Black screen on some channels

Discussion of getting WMC to work on Windows 10 (unsupported)
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tiggeroz

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Black screen on some channels

#1

Post by tiggeroz » Sun Jul 15, 2018 12:32 am

Hi,

I'm a newbie to these forums and hope someone out there knows a bit more than I do!

For ref., I am in Perth, Western Australia. Since the latest April, etc. updates to W10, I've had lots of issues generally which I seem to have resolved to a point where WMC runs stably on my PC. The one exception is that occasionally, when I switch channels I get a black screen... the sound plays for a few seconds and then cuts out... everything appears like the channel is playing (if I move the mouse, the time bar appears and counts the time normally), just no picture shows on the screen. Things I've tried:
- If I change channels up and down a few times I can get the channel to play.
- Changing tuner cards - made no difference even when I swapped to a totally different manufacturer's card.

The issue also affects some recordings.... they appear in my thumbnail list but then when I try to play I get a black screen with (usually) just a few seconds of audio at the beginning before cutting out. Weirdly, I can play these .wtv files perfectly in Windows Media Player but not in WMC.

Any ideas would be much appreciated. I've seen some posts that seem to point at the graphics card - I've got an NVidia Geforce GT520 in there currently.

Thanks in advance for any and all advice,

Keith.

tiggeroz

Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Jun 30, 2018 1:44 am
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#2

Post by tiggeroz » Sun Jul 15, 2018 9:55 pm

OK... a bit more info. I've tried a completely separate PC and have exactly the same problem - other than the screen goes plain blue rather than black! Also, the .wtv files that play on WMP don't allow FFW or rewind so it appears that there must be some kind of corruption in the files?

tiggeroz

Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Jun 30, 2018 1:44 am
Location:

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#3

Post by tiggeroz » Sat Aug 18, 2018 12:43 am

Right.. I've done some more work and think I understand what is causing the problem but am unsure how to fix it.

If I only use SD channels, everything seems to work fine consistently, including making programmed recordings. If I use any HD channel even once (which are all H264), then at some point afterwards I start getting random channels being black screen with either no sound, a few seconds of sound or sound that keeps going. Rebooting the machine seems to reset everything until I use another HD channel which will make the issue recur.

Scanning the forums seems to suggest that this is a well-known issue but I couldn't spot the solution (sorry if it's there and I'm just being thick). I'm assuming this is something to do with my CoDecs (possibly the H264 one) but don't know what settings to change to resolve it. Please can anyone help?

For reference, I'm currently running with 2 DVico Fusion dual tuners (i.e. 4 tuners in total) but have had exactly the same experience when running a Hauppauge QuadHD (also 4 tuners but on a single PCI-E card). Thanks all.

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