Live TV suddenly goes black

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matthers

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Live TV suddenly goes black

#1

Post by matthers » Tue Apr 03, 2018 11:31 am

Hi
I'm puzzled by what has happened to my long running Windows 7 Ultimate media center HTPC which i've had running for several years now. On March 23rd 2018 my Live TV picture went black, but i could still hear the sound. No problem, i'll just roll back to a known good backup from March 1st. This made no difference.
My thoughts:
1. Hardware failure of some sort
2. Time/Date has had an affect on the machine causing some software to misbehave
3. BIOS has somehow been modified causing the issue which means a restore won't help.

Most movie formats didn't play but audio was ok. Some formats did play ok. Live TV was just black screen but audio ok. Plex is installed on the media centre too - this gives a green screen with audio when playing movies. So it looks like a codec issue, but my restore didn't help. Why not?

So i rolled back the BIOS to an early version in case Microsoft had somehow pushed some Spectre/Meltdown update to the machine using the 2 files in the Windows directory which allows them to patch the microcode. No joy.
So i rolled back, disconnected the network cable so no updates or anything could happen - same.
So i modified the BIOS clock and rolled back and still the same.
I updated graphics card drivers, TV tuner card drivers, still nothing

After a day of poking around i went into Shark 007 x64 bit settings, swap tab and checked the box to 'Disable Microsoft's video Decoder'. This fixed it! How? Why?

I was going to leave it like this but noticed a change in behaviour. When running LiveTV i now see an icon for the LAV Video Decoder which has taken over to make things work. The problem i now have is that rewinding and forwarding liveTV causes Media Center to have a problem and the only way to get TV working again is to restart Media Center.

Does anyone have any ideas how or what has happened here? Am tearing my hair out to figure this one out. Again - a restore to a known good backup didn't help so updating drivers for anything should be irrelevant.

Thanks in advance!

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DavidinCT

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#2

Post by DavidinCT » Tue Apr 03, 2018 12:55 pm

Black Screen... To me, sounds like a video card heat or starting to fail., or video card driver issue. Disabling Microsoft's video driver sounds like a band aid to me. It could be as simple as blowing out the dust in the PC but, it could be a starting to fail video card.

I would swap your video card with anopther, if you have access to one and try it all again.
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DaveInPa

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#3

Post by DaveInPa » Tue Apr 03, 2018 1:37 pm

It could be a change in the tv signal being sent. Many of us have had issues with black screen and ff/rew freezing WMC because of a change in signal from cable providers (specifically Comcast).

Intel graphics have a hard time with the new video streams that the cable companies are sending. I've not experienced that problem (non-intel graphics).

But, the freezing of WMC because of ff/rew is something that is a problem that I experience for most HD channels (non-network).

Has your cable company made a recent change? Upgrade to h.264?

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#4

Post by Space » Tue Apr 03, 2018 2:11 pm

I'm not sure if the symptoms indicate it, but could it be an HDMI cable that has gone bad? Or perhaps the HDMI port on the TV (try another port)?

I had a problem a while ago that just popped up out of nowhere (after a long time of no problems) where I was getting "display driver error" when trying to view live TV or when playing back recordings that were protected. After pulling my hair out and doing a lot of different things, it turned out to be a "loose" HDMI connector on the TV. Jiggle it a bit and it started working again.

So, I am not sure if a black screen with audio could be a symptom of a bad HDMI/HDCP connection, but I figure it is worth a shot and a lot easier to do then messing with drivers and such.

Note that the two things that are affected by a bad HDCP connection are watching live TV and playing back protected content through WMC. If you play back a non-protected video in WMC, you will not see a problem if the HDCP connection is not working.


One other thing that I know does cause black screen with audio only is if a tuner tunes in a H.264 channel, and then you later switch to a MPEG2 channel. The MPEG2 channel will be black (sometimes). This is a know bug in WMC and there is no known fix other than trying not to tune the two different codecs on the same tuner. If you have enough tuners, you can assign some of them to only tune the H.264 channels exclusively, and the rest of the tuners exclusive to MPEG2 channels.

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#5

Post by ZippyTheChicken » Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:21 pm

sounds like you have some type of conflict happening
you might want to do a full reinstall of windows and media center and your tv card drivers

I am saying this because you say you fixed the problem to some extent by a software setting.

Sometimes the os gets overloaded with so much crap that you can't clean it out and you just need to reinstall

might help .. might not

good luck

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#6

Post by matthers » Wed Apr 04, 2018 7:45 am

Thanks all
@ZippyTheChicken - nothing new was installed and the rollback failed too so don't think it's been overloaded
@Space - have recently replaced the HDMI cable. The fact that it can still play the content by just using another codec to me means the cable is working ok. I have 2 dual Hauppauge 2200 cards in it. The fact that other movies won't play, which doesn't involve the tuner cards, indicates it's more of a codec issue with the whole machine
@DaveInPa - all TV stations don't work so probably not a broadcast thing all at the same time. Being forced to use the LAV codec is causing rewind and forwarding issues. Using the original codec when the screen was black I could forward and rewind without a problem, even though i couldn't see the TV screen, i could hear that it didn't break
@DavidinCT - yes, thought this too. I reseated the card already and it didn't help. Havent taken a screwdriver to it to take the case off the card, but it's an issue on boot when it's cold so probably not a heat thing

I ran a few tools to identify the codecs as i know that has fixed it. ffdshow video wasn't there!? Have reinstalled x86 and x64 drivers but haven't done any post config through Shark007 to (i think) force the use of x64 drivers with Media Center. It's been a long time since i configured all of this and i know there's quite a bit involved. Still don't understand how a restore didn't fix it which almost indicates a hardware failure like DavidinCT thinks also. Will go down the route of reconfiguring all the drivers and will report back.

Thanks all

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DavidinCT

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#7

Post by DavidinCT » Wed Apr 04, 2018 12:31 pm

Do you do backups on your system ? Like I do, just the OS drive (keeping all my "media" on other drives) so incase WMC goes down, I can roll back a few days (I only do it once a week).

If you do that, run a full backup, grab a Windows 7 SP1 disc and give it a shot for the re-install. Personally, If I had access to another computer with a video card, I would swap to see if it fixes the problem.

What type of codecs do you install ? Of course codecs can conflict but, if you have not done any changes in a while, it might not be that unless something got corrupt. Do a full scan disk on the computer, make sure you don't have a failing hard drive or problems with the file system. This can also show these types of issues.

A few years ago, almost recording I did video was broken up (digital pixilation), after going to down the video card route, it never resolved. It was found that the Recording drive was starting to fail, causing performance issues that caused this.

All in all, if your backing up your system, doing a full format and re-install to troubleshoot this would be your best way to know for sure. Just get the OS, tuner and WMC setup (no codecs or anything else), and if your still getting issues, I would lean even more towards hardware. If you have no problems, then add things one by one testing for a while before moving on to the next.

Good luck and let us know what you find out.
matthers wrote: @DavidinCT - yes, thought this too. I reseated the card already and it didn't help. Havent taken a screwdriver to it to take the case off the card, but it's an issue on boot when it's cold so probably not a heat thing
As I read this more, it happens when the computer boots ? Video system someplace, video card, HDMI connection, etc is where your problem is.

Do you plug directly into TV, or AVR, then a TV ? Try this... Power everything down, UNPLUG everything, let it sit for 5-10 min, plug back and power everything back on and try again.

Sounding like a HDMI sync based issue.. Doing this will reset everything and reset the HDMI sync on all your devices.

I personally have seen this exact issue before and the power off/unplug fixed the issue. It was not just my HTPC/WMC machine doing this.
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matthers

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#8

Post by matthers » Wed Apr 04, 2018 11:28 pm

@DavidinCT -
matthers wrote:but it's an issue on boot when it's cold so probably not a heat thing
- sorry, bad wording. Was referring to the heat concern. The problem exists the moment you boot it up and get straight into MC, so the card would still be cool at this point. The screen is only black when in Media Center whilst viewing LiveTV or trying to play most movies, depending on their codecs.

Interestingly enough, i can schedule TV to record, and it does actually record as i can play it back in VLC, even though i just get a black screen when viewing it in Media Center.

I do run it through an Onkyo amp but in testing I bypassed it, shut down the MC, started it up and had the same problem.

All media is stored remotely on a NAS so my backup is of the C drive and system partition too. I did initially try and do a complete reinstall but i got an error after i blew away the partitions on the SSD upon trying to reinstall Windows - it wouldn't let me at the time so that was as far as i got. Definitely an avenue still worth pursuing.

I guess a really important answer for me is can a graphics card break 'a little'. I can watch LiveTV when disabling the Microsoft driver in Shark007, which comes with a warning that 'this will break live TV'. In fact it actually fixes it for me. I did remove the graphics card again last night but there wasn't much of a casing at all on it so nothing to do. It just has a large heatsink on it and not much else.

Last night i spent hours looking at codecs. Geez - remember those days. I have ffdshow x86 and x64 installed and then Shark007 Advanced pack. I rolled back a few times last night and completely stripped all ffdshow installs and Shark007 installs, cleaned out the registry pointing to anything in those old paths and same problem. Reinstalled ffdshow x86 then got an error when installing x64 ffdshow about needing to uninstall a previous version. I thought i needed both installed at the same time. The install window for x64 popped up after the uninstall x86 driver window, so i just installed x64 as well and then cancelled the x86 ffdshow uninstall window at the end. Upon installing Shark007 Standard pack this time, i couldn't see much ffdshow in that window. It now actually looks like ffdshow has been deprecated and LAV splitter is where i need to be. Tried that. Same thing. Then went down the path of install MPC-Black Edition and also install madVR but was all black when playing anything through that, but could hear sound.

Really starting to think hardware still, so long as it's possible for a graphics card to refuse to play a particular codec, but can happily play others. Seems odd to me.

As a side note, the power supply did fail 3 weeks ago, but this was after i was having all the issues. Don't think this was related but thought i'd include it.

Will look at a complete reinstall and will use a separate hdd if i have to due to the errors i was getting before.

Cheers.

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#9

Post by Space » Thu Apr 05, 2018 12:29 am

Running "sfc /scannow" should fix any corrupted or missing system files. I'm not sure if it fixes codecs or not.

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#10

Post by Crash2009 » Thu Apr 05, 2018 5:15 am

Motherboard battery

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Crash2009

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#11

Post by Crash2009 » Thu Apr 05, 2018 5:18 am


matthers

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#12

Post by matthers » Fri Apr 06, 2018 4:05 am

Crash2009 wrote:Any of that look familiar?
Hey Crash2009. As the issue extends further than all TV channels to the majority of movies, and the 3rd party application Plex also has issues playing movies too, its more to do with the failure to play certain types of codecs rather than the broadcasting format types.

I haven't had time to test a complete reinstall but am guessing it won't help either as my restore didn't rectify the issue.

Does anyone know of any tool which will display what codec is being used, or trying to be used, to play a file? I could try the sysinternals suite of tools like procmon and procexp but was hoping there may be a way to see what codec is launched when it tries to play Live TV or a movie. The Plex log file itself gave me some output which was good when i first started troubleshooting this. Just want to see error messages. Within Windows there's nothing in the event logs which is annoying. Any thoughts?

Thanks

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Crash2009

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#13

Post by Crash2009 » Sat Apr 07, 2018 2:17 am

Wmc has a diagnosis. While you are playing the channel or file in question.....

Press 411info on your remote...

Use right arrow to view 6 or so pages.

The codec info is on the last page to the right

Use Google for complete directions.
Last edited by Crash2009 on Sat Apr 07, 2018 2:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

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#14

Post by Crash2009 » Sat Apr 07, 2018 2:19 am

Re Event Viewer, most of the good stuff is in the Media Center section.

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Crash2009

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#15

Post by Crash2009 » Sat Apr 07, 2018 2:27 am

The Ceton driver has a great diag. Works even if no Ceton tuner.

Logo at the last tab.....enable advanced logging and reboot. Do what ever you have to to reproduce the error in question.

Go back to the Ceton diag, capture and save.

Go back to the Ceton advanced logging TAB AND SHUT LOGGING OFF, then reboot.

If you don't SHUT off logging, IT WILL CONTINUE LOGGING until your drive is full.

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Crash2009

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#16

Post by Crash2009 » Sat Apr 07, 2018 2:33 am

ProcMon would be the best choice.....

if you can figure out how to run it, please share with the rest of us.

matthers

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#17

Post by matthers » Wed May 16, 2018 11:33 pm

Hi all
Last night i replaced my graphics card, unchecked the box to 'break live tv' within Shark007 codecs and full functionality has been restored to allow me to fast forward and rewind live TV without the need to restart Media Centre to continue watching TV. Am guessing, as first thought, that a component failed on the graphics card forcing me to change to another codec which had side effects. Thanks for everyones help and suggestions.

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