Vista SP1 released officially - Page 4

The issue with my DVD menus not working correctly after SP1 appears to be with the video card. A newer driver was released and after updating, the menus appear to be working great.

Anyone else having issues with Vista Media Center hanging after the SP1 update? It hangs when I try to access recorded tv or live tv/ Media Center has not run nearly as smooth since the update. The OS takes longer to boot as well. I have vista home premium.

Do you think that registry hacks, such as mymounter, done prior to the install might be the cause for the instability?

On Vista Ultimate SP-1 my OS start up time is a little faster. As for VMC I haven't noticed any hangs or sluggish behavior. My only problem was incorrect guide data for a few of my OTA ATSC channels. I corrected that with a manual override.

Well Sp1 update was smooth, relatively. Do have a few changes to report. Not able to get WCAU-DT any more, now getting KYW-DT. FOX survived with a few other DT OTA channels, on the same antenna, pointing in the same direction. There are two antennas on the same mask, switched to a 114 inch VHF-UHF antenna, same results. At first thought it was my imagination, until reading this thread.

VMC is giving me green screens on channels that should have signals. VMC is freezing up. Esc works sometimes, but generally have to shutdown VMC using task manager.

Computer will not sleep or wake properly after SP1. Since this is a new computer, two weeks old, I am totally bummed out. Not certain what is working properly at this point, but certain it was better before the update. That's what I get for not listening to my past experiences with failed SP1 updates.

I'm glad to read I'm not the only one seeing the black screen issues with SP1 when "skip" or "replay" is used within Media Center.

Here are the bugs that I thought would be fixed (or at least not there) with SP1 - but I am currently seeing with our main HTPC:

Grey Scale: SP1 didn't change anything with our ATI HD 2600XT. I still need to use the UseBT601CSC=1 registry hack combined with using +15/85% (brightness/contrast) in the main color settings for the video card as well as another +10/85% in the AVIVO settings in order to get everything to pass greyscale calibration tests. At least with the combination of the registry hack and the various brightness/contrast settings I can get calibrated grey levels consistent for Media Center, Power DVD Ultra, and WMP.

With our other Vista Home Premium system, with an Nvidia 6800 PCIe video card, the greyscales are all messed up still also. I haven't bothered trying to calibrate it, but I can't see any way to bring PowerDVD Ultra, WMP and Media Center all together with the same grey levels. With Media Center darks are too bright and whites are good and with PDVD and WMP, darks are too dark and whites are far too bright and clipped (white shirts have no detail).

Both the ATI and Nvidia cards are running the latest Vista video drivers.

Crashing Media Center with HD content: SP1 made these crashes worse. Typically the 2nd and sometimes the 3rd time "play" is used with digitally recorded HD content in Media Center (dvr-ms files), Media Center will crash and then auto-restart. Upon a fresh restart, it will always play the same show without crashing. Note it is only Vista Media Center and only with our HTPC with the ATI HD 2600XT video card this happens. Our other MCE2005 (ATI or Nvidia) PCs and other Vista PC with the Nvidia video card do not crash at all with this same content.

Temporary black screen after clicking "skip" or "replay": When watching HD content, if I click "skip" or "replay" on the remote with any of our Vista SP1 systems (Nvidia or ATI), the screen often temporarily goes black. Over the next second or so, it pixelates and fills the screen with the proper video and then continues to play it correctly.


Reading through the posts above, there are others with exactly the same bugs (not necessarily all on one system though...).

To get the same grey levels with nVidia card after SP1, use driver version 163.75 until nVidia decides to release a new driver which has this issue fixed. They have not updated their WHQL driver since December 2007!

That is the only problem I am having with both of my computers.

This is probably not related, but just in case; after my initial install of Vista I had some problems with it not waking properly. I ended up switching screen savers and haven't had a problem since.

My sleep stopped working after SP1 also. Today I just ran though the power configuration again and after that it is now sleeping again. Hopefully it will keep working since it used to work perfectly prior to SP1.

I get the "checkerboarding" (black screen resolves to picture in blocks) problem when skipping forward or backward while playing back recorded HD programs, but only on some channels. For example, it happens on ABC HD programs, but not on NBC programs. I also get the temporary green screen sometimes after changing channels to an HD channel. The video card is an Nvidia 7600GT.

I have the same problem with all of my Vista SP1 systems.

It seems to be only certain HD content that has this problem though. We record HD through FireSTB

The issue is unrelated to the video card and CPU power though. One of my systems has a PCIe ATI HD 2600XT video card and an Intel Q6600 processor. The other Vista SP1 system has an older PCIe Nvidia 6800 and an AMD 64 3400+ processor. The issue is identical on both systems.

The ATI/Q6600 system also regularly crashes when attempting to play HD content.

Note this issue is with Vista Media Center only. PowerDVD Ultra plays both HD-DVD and Blue-ray without this issue.

millerbrad, which video card and motherboard do you have?

I've been talking to someone at Microsoft about this issue and I've been told that their test system (that is very similar to mine) is not experiencing the video errors nor the need to restart VMC after watching certain HD content.

My system has an ATI HD 2600XT video card, an Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 motherboard and an Intel Q6600 processor.

I'm desperately looking for a solution to this problem. The issue really takes away from the functionality of our dedicated HTPC. My family uses this HTPC for absolutely all of our TV watching so this is a big problem for us.

None of our other PCs have this problem and this is when watching the same content that causes problems with the main HTPC. The other PCs either have Nvidia video cards (and Vista SP1) or are running MCE2005.

Have you found a solution to your Vista Media Center crashes when watching certain content?

You mentioned MS having a fix for the OEM codec. Is there a patch available somewhere or do you mean included with SP1?

Did you find a fix?

I dont use Vista Media Center.. My system worked very nicely below and after SP1 in respect to audio/video of HDTV stuff (both from cable and over the air). If anything, things seem to work a bit better, with better performance.

One of my SP1 system woke up many mornings around 6 am. There does not appear to be any legitimate reason for it to do this; there is a process scheduled to run at 6am, but it is not set to wake up the computer.

Yep, re-installed my audio drivers, and that fixed it.

(To be exact, uninstalled audio drivers, rebooted, installed audio drivers, reboot, fixed...)

I have a 2400 ATI video card and all I did was add DXVA_NOHDDECODE = 0 into the registry.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\ControlSet001\\Control\\Class\\{ 4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\\0000\\UMD\\DXVA]
"DXVA_NOHDDECODE"="0"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\ControlSet001\\Control\\Class\\{ 4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\\0001\\UMD\\DXVA]
"DXVA_NOHDDECODE"="0"

You have to do it twice, once for each port. For my card, it turns on hardware acceleration and stops the crashes. I dont know if the 2600 installs with HD acc. already turned on so cant say if this works for the 2600.

I was being sarcastic when I mentioned "fix". They actually broke it in SP1. This article, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943195/en-us, is what broke the codec. I had installed it, previous to SP1, and experienced the same crashes. I immediately ripped it out and prayed that SP1 wouldnt exhibit the same problem. My prayer wasnt answered.



-dickm

Motherboard = Intel DP35DP with ATI Digital Cable Tuner BIOS

Video Card = ATI HD 2600XT with Catalyst v7.7 (the problem is not fixed with newer drivers)

The issue is with the video decoder changes from SP1. Using AVIVO for video eliminates the problem (but I can't get DVDs to work for some reason).

Thank you everyone for all the replies.

taz, I've tried uninstalling, rebooting and re-installing the audio drivers and it didn't help.

millerbrad, it is strange that only some ATI HD 2600XTs seem to have these issues and others dont. I wonder if ATI changed something in the hardware somewhere along the way and this causes this issue. Is your card a genuine ATI HD 2600XT? Mine is.

My 2600XT is Sapphire-branded. I don't know that it's so much that only some cards have the problem, as much as some video causes the problem. Perhaps you should send your MS contact a video sample from the culprit TV station. Whatever it is in the video feed that causes the problem may not be present in any of the TV stations available to the MS product testers.

System creshed suring install with SP1, It's probably time for a reinstall though. Will be trying again this weekend

Experienced problems with my Nvidia GeForce 8400GS video card and using VMC for watching HDTV channels, which were working perfectly, prior to SP1 and a display driver update. Started to experiencing both video lipsync and picture freezing. One of two solved the problem. Installing an older driver in the safe mode or uninstalling SP1, which failed and reinstalled itself. Found a reference that you need to disable anti-virus programs in the background when installing video drivers. Uninstalled the existing driver and restarted in safemode. The only way to disable my anti-virus operating in the background was to fire up in safemode. Vista installed the older video driver and all problems disappeared. Not certain it will solve your problems, but give it a try. Tempted to updating the new driver the same way, but will leave that for another time. This fixed only took me two weeks of time.

I have sent them samples and on their test systems the sample play fine - yet on mine, they don't.

One of their test systems is very similar to mine, except that instead of a Gigabyte motherboard (like mine), it has an ASUS motherboard. The hardware specs, other than the MB, are virtually identical. Even the chipset, RAM, and audio codec are the same as well as the video card.

I simply don't understand how it is possible for VMC to crash on my system and not on theirs. On top of this, it is only VMC that has trouble with these recordings on my system. I can use PowerDVD, Media Player, Graphedit and probably anything else to play the recordings without any trouble at all. With the exception to this playback issue in VMC, my HTPC is 100% rock solid in absolutely every single way, including memory testing, burn-in testing and video performance testing. I've even tried a fresh Vista install with nothing except the core OS and all Windows Updates and it still crashed on the same recordings (as you mentioned, it is only certain recordings that crash too; all the rest play flawlessly).

Our system also plays absolutely all (that I've tried) Blue-ray and HD-DVD movies flawlessly too. Even movies that are known to be prone to stutter and/or not play well on many systems.

It is almost as if ATI slightly changed something in their video cards and certain cards don't work well with Vista Media Center when being asked to play specific HD recordings.

I think my next step is going to have to be replacing the video card.

Our HTPC doesn't have any antivirus software installed. I have run both Microsoft's and Norton's on-line virus checks and the system is clean.

I've also tried several different Catalyst driver versions and it still has the same problem.

I have spent probably 70-100 hours trying different things to resolve these issues so far.

HT Slider, have you tried reseting your DRM strore? I had a similar problem, although not with Media Center, but with Media Player - it will crash playing dvr-ms files. After I reset the DRM store, it worked fine. There are instructions on MS site how to reset the DRM store.

I put in SP1 on Friday. Didn't see any important good things. Only saw a couple of minor bad things, like the blacking out during skips and occasional "video error" when stopping a currently recording show to delete it. Uninstalled it today.

So, can anybody tell me why I should have SP1? "Not broken, don't fix" seems appropriate.

I haven't, but I did try a fresh install of Vista and it still crashed the same way.

Keep in mind my system doesn't always crash. VMC is always able to play everything the very first time VMC is started. The problem is once an HD show is stopped and then the same or another HD show is attempted to be played, there is roughly a 50/50 chance it will crash - or play fine.

It is almost as if VMC leaves something to do with the video card in the wrong state and VMC is then not able to initiate DXVA properly the next time it tries to play HD content.

The problem is only with VMC (Vista Media Center). Absolutely everything else, including Media Player and PowerDVD Ultra do not have this issue and never crash ever.

If we exit Media Center between each and every time we watch TV, Media Center doesn't crash either (of course since this is a dedicated HTPC and we are using Media Center as our primary interface, we leave Media Center running all the time).

I think you are on the right track - I am positive VMC leaves something with the video card in the worng state. I am experiencing a problem that has to do with 3D screen savers:
1. Set your screensaver to any of the Micrososft 3D screensavers, e.g. Windows Energy.
2. Open VMC and play a dvr-ms file
3. Stop playback and put your computer to sleep
4. Wake up the computer
5. 3D screensaver does not work anymore, I get "Windows cannot start this screensaver"
6. Close VMC, and all is good again - the 3D screensaver works.



See 6. above - the fact that you have to close VMC has _definitely_ something to do with the video card state...

I have the same (or similar) problem with screen savers.

We have to actually exit VMC in order for the screen savers to work after we've watched Recorded TV.