PC completely locked up/frozen when Live TV paused

Sancho12 · 06 Jul 2011

Hi all.

I just built a Win7 HP SP1 64-bit box and installed a Ceton InfiniTV 4 tuner. I encountered the following problem today:

When pausing Live TV for more than 20 min., the PC becomes completely unresponsive and requires a hard reset. Here are the symptoms/indications:

After 10 min. a screensaver kicks in (I'm assuming this is a WMC function; lots of koala bears, etc.)
10 min. after that my LG LD550 TV kicks in with a "No Signal" screensaver.
Any attempt to regain control of the PC is lost and a hard reset must be performed.

Here are the relevant system specs:
Mobo: ASRock P67 Extreme6
CPU: Intel Core i5-2400 Sandy Bridge 3.1GHz
RAM: 8 GB of G.SKILL Sniper Low Voltage Series DDR3 1600
Video: SAPPHIRE Ultimate 100289UL Radeon HD 5670 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready
PSU: Antec EarthWatts EA650 650W Continuous Power
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit

This is a serious bug, but I'm at a loss to explain it (why I'm here, eh?

) Who's guilty? WMC? Ceton? AMD/ATI? M$ Win7? All of the above??? Inquiring minds want to know!

Makes my registry hack to set the pause time to 100 min. look rather foolish

Thanks in advance!
Sancho

P.S. - forgot to mention that resuming playback during the WMC screensaver works, with the exception that audio is garbled until playback is paused and resumed, or a jumpback is performed (tweaked to 7s in the registry ;-)

MvdB · 07 Jul 2011

Hello Sancho, welcome to SF!

Have you checked if a dumpfile is created when it freezes / crashes? If so, could you follow the bsod posting instructions to help us get all the right info? https://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-d...tructions.html

MvdB · 07 Jul 2011

second thought....two more checks:
have you looked at your power settings? Seems to me you have to make sure the connection to the tv is never lost. It's ok for things to sleep but its not ok for this connection to power down to such a state that the TV thinks there is no input.

And... small chance but one never knows... have you set the pc up as a mediaplayer w/ HDD function were, during pause, you expect the PC to save all data so you can continue later?

Sancho12 · 07 Jul 2011

MvdB said:

second thought....two more checks:
have you looked at your power settings? Seems to me you have to make sure the connection to the tv is never lost. It's ok for things to sleep but its not ok for this connection to power down to such a state that the TV thinks there is no input.

And... small chance but one never knows... have you set the pc up as a mediaplayer w/ HDD function were, during pause, you expect the PC to save all data so you can continue later?

Awww, man, you nailed it! And I feel a little

for not thinking to check the power scheme. I had indeed set the High Performance scheme to shut off the monitor after 20 min. That coincides exactly with the lockup problem. Guess the ATI/AMD card, Ceton InfiniTV 4 and/or Windows Media Center freak out when WMC is paused on Live TV and the monitor signal is lost (may happen with recorded content, too; I assume it would). Anyway, setting the monitor shut off to "Never" solved it

Yes, this system is pretty much a DVR, so I expect the TV to pause for what I've tweaked it to in the registry (100 min), and then resume playback.

As for the BSOD and dump files, I never saw a BSOD so I'm not sure if Windows produced a dump file. I did get the "Windows did not shutdown correctly..." message when rebooting. But since you solved this minor mystery, I'll let sleeping dogs lie ;-)

Thanks again! Excellent support

Cheers.
Sancho

MvdB · 07 Jul 2011

My pleasure! Happy we could help.... :)

PS... if this is solved, could you please mark it so in the top of your thread?