HTPC Problem

alex24 · 16 Dec 2009 at 21:40

Whenever my HTPC wakes up from sleep (S3), any video (noticed this in media center and WMP) causes the system to get stuck mini-freezing, where it locks up for a few seconds and then returns, and then repeats itself constantly until you close the program. A restart fixes the problem.

Does anyone know a fix for this issue?

The system:

AMD Athlon X2 4200 under an Alpenfohn panorama (nice and cool)
Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H rev 1.1
ATI Radeon HD3200 (onboard 780G chipset) running 9.11 cats and chipset software from motherboard site.
2x2GB OCZ PC6400 DDR2
Samsung 1TB F1
LG Blu-ray HD-DVD combo drive
Hauppage WinTV Nova-T 500 TV tuner
All in an Antec Fusion Micro

Running Windows 7 x64.

Any ideas?

TIA

EDIT: Also note I was getting a problem where there were loads of errors in event viewer from the ati service. I used the registry to turn them off as I had a feeling they were causing the freezing as they were generated so frequently. The error was from atikmdag and stated 'UVD information' from the task category 'DVD_OV'.

CBJ · 16 Dec 2009 at 22:03

It could be various things, but one option might be that some codecs are not getting reinitialised properly after the sleep. Do you know which codecs are being used to play back these videos? Have you tried videos with a different encoding to see if they suffer from the same problem?

alex24 · 16 Dec 2009 at 22:07

That's a fair point. The videos are all recordings from media center in DVR-MS format, which I imagine is MPEG2.

VLC works correctly after resuming, though the DVR-MS playback is poor - the video and audio are out of sync. That happens normally anyway. Other video always works fine in VLC.

Perhaps it's something to do with the video overlay?

alex24 · 19 Dec 2009 at 12:37

I've also noticed quite poor performance when there is some video running and other animations on screen, such as flash or the TV Guide overlay on media center when there's video behind it. I'd have thought the ATI 3200 would have been at least up to rendering the effects smoothly when SD video was playing but it appears not.

I know this is quite a popular motherboard, does anyone else have these issues, and if not, what drivers are you using?

CBJ · 19 Dec 2009 at 12:46

The latest 9.12 catalyst driver release notes mention something about fixing a video-related problem after resuming from sleep or hibernate. The details don't match your situation exactly but it's got to be worth a try.

alex24 · 19 Dec 2009 at 12:52

Yes, I did read that actually, tried the 9.12's yesterday and the problem remains unfortunately. I haven't installed the hotfix yet, but it doesn't seem to apply to the 3200 anyway.

I had another brainwave just now, I might try something:

It appears the DVD_OV problem may relate to the video overlay and HDCP in some way, I'm not sure exactly. I'm going to see if the problem occurs over a VGA connection as opposed to the HDMI it's going over now.

This might shed some light on the issue, but is not a fix as such since I need HDMI to run 1080p resolution on my HDTV.

mrteabag · 19 Dec 2009 at 14:10

In my experience,HDMI thats built in on the mobo causes more problems than the vga

alex24 · 19 Dec 2009 at 14:36

mrteabag said:
In my experience,HDMI thats built in on the mobo causes more problems than the vga

This is because of HDCP. It's been a pain getting it to work (still doesn't) properly with my Toshiba LCD TV, but there's another thread on that.

I'm just fishing out an old monitor to plug the vga into.