TheGreenButton - Windows Media Center Forums

I think this question has come up before, but my search for same failed. Apologies if this is the case! The issue is that for about two weeks I am not getting the small icons to the left of the recorded program info, only small plain blue icons. I re-loaded the TV signal (Comcast), no joy, then shut down the HTPC (Win7) for 5 minutes, restarted and they all came back, BUT: New recordings bring the same issue all over again (those new recordings only). The only thing that has changed in the past two weeks is that I changed my Comcast package from one that included the premiums to one that does not, the change taking place about the time this "no icons" business started, but even in the past I have seen this situation also from time to time, then it got corrected for a while after a reboot, so not sure Comcast has anything to do with the issue. Anyone have a clue what is going on here?

If you're talking about the thumbnails that go with the listing in Recorded TV, that is actually a frame grab from the actual recording. It may mean your hard drive is slow and it's taking a while to update them, as they are populated fresh each time you open Recorded TV.

Missing thumbnails has come up in the past and it was usually due to one of the existing recordings being corrupted in some way. If you moved that recording to another folder or deleted it, then the thumbnails would reappear for the other recordings.

However, in your case, this does not seem to be the issue, since you say a system restart caused them to come back.

As unclebun said, it can take a while for the thumbnails to show up, as WMC needs to process the video in each recording and generate the thumbnail. I suppose a hard disk that is going bad can contribute to this slow down. But I don't think I've ever seen your exact issue reported (thumbnails missing, but coming back after a reboot)

Thanks, guys. I mean this is not a huge deal, but would be nice to have them.

I get this quite often. I'm running MCEBuddy which deletes recordings when it's processed them, I think this confuses the thumbnail generation process too.
In task Manager I kill ehvid.exe and it auto-relaunches when you next open Recorded TV.

Certainly there are sometimes "corrupted" files where ehvid.exe just gets stuck.

In task Manager I kill ehvid.exe and it auto-relaunches when you next open Recorded TV.


So is that what you think I should do in my case? How exactly do I do that in Task Manager or better just leave well enough alone as I reboot every couple of weeks anyway?

Well, abracadabra and the situation resolved itself. New recordings now showing the icons. For another reason, I re-booted my modem (Comcast supplied gateway) and the next time I looked at my latest recordings, all the icons are present and accounted for.
Does that make any sense?

Well, the issue returned with a vengeance (not that it is a huge deal) but I think I now know the cause. Turns out that all mu update downloads ate up huge space in my 60 gig HDD. Ran the Windows Cleanup and deleted some files, first and foremost an old version of Windows, and now all the icons are back and showing just fine. I was actually showing 63 gig of files on the 60 gig HDD, surprising though that sounds. Now all good, but will obviously have to start deleting some of the update downloads at some point.

Last couple of days it is back again. Looks like reboot of the PC is the only fix.