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Screens off. Turn off HDMI handshake?

post #1 of 8
8/12/08 at 8:27am
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I have a HTPC hooked up DVI => HDMI of Denon AVR and HDMI => LG 23" LCD TV. Both feeds are identical 1080p/60 in Nvidias "clone" mode.

I want to be able to turn off the AVR and TV as needed and when I turn them on and switch inputs appropriately the HTPC should display. In general things work well but occasionally one or both of the displays is off and when I use the remote, kb, mouse nothing "wakes up" the displays.

I thought the issue was the monitors turning off do to power save but I disabled that. What is the issue here?? Sometimes one display works and not the other and I have to manually set it to clone mode again.

I have a saved "profile" stipulating 1080p/60 and clone mode and I would even be happy with an IR enabled shortcut that loaded the appropriate NVIDA profile (this could be integrated into my "Watch => HTPC" macros). I have not seen anyway to do this in the NVIDIA control panel.

Does anybody have similar issues? I have an Nvidia 8400gs and have considered upgrading to get some more control/options but really I don't need to game with it at all. Are the low/mid tier ATI solutions better for what I want?

Thanks,
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post #2 of 8
8/12/08 at 9:03am
I have a similar problem in that I have an LCD touchscreen on the HTPC fed by VGA, and an HDMI output to my AVR which feeds the TV. This is on Intel G35 video, and clone mode outputs the same resolution to both VGA and HDMI. As the touchscreen is only 1024x768 this means the TV gets big black borders so when watching stuff I have to switch to HDMI only to get full-screen viewing. If just listening to music, i use the touchscreen alone but the audio needs to go to the AVR so I need to have clone mode enabled to get sound. I got my remote to switch displays, so I can have video on touch screen OR TV, but I cannot get the remote to switch on clone mode ( Intel do not define a hotkey action for it and you cannot add your own!). I too have set up profiles for each display and one for both in clone mode, but I cannot set a hotkey so cannot get the remote to select a profile. Seems your NVidia solution suffers the same drawback. Not sure about ATI but it would be good to solve this one.
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post #3 of 8
8/12/08 at 10:36am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by eeit232 View Post

I have a similar problem in that I have an LCD touchscreen on the HTPC fed by VGA, and an HDMI output to my AVR which feeds the TV. This is on Intel G35 video, and clone mode outputs the same resolution to both VGA and HDMI. As the touchscreen is only 1024x768 this means the TV gets big black borders so when watching stuff I have to switch to HDMI only to get full-screen viewing. If just listening to music, i use the touchscreen alone but the audio needs to go to the AVR so I need to have clone mode enabled to get sound. I got my remote to switch displays, so I can have video on touch screen OR TV, but I cannot get the remote to switch on clone mode ( Intel do not define a hotkey action for it and you cannot add your own!). I too have set up profiles for each display and one for both in clone mode, but I cannot set a hotkey so cannot get the remote to select a profile. Seems your NVidia solution suffers the same drawback. Not sure about ATI but it would be good to solve this one.


Sounds like we have a similar setup. When I "Listen => HTPC" it would use the 23" screen. When I "Watch => HTPC" it uses the 52". My small screen is 1366x768 but accepts 1080p so I can use 1080p in clone mode full time. On the small screen the 1080p overscans but choosing music in VMC is fine. On the small screen HD .avi video tears a bit but as it's a small screen to keep an eye on a 2nd (or 3rd ) sporting event it is fine and worth the convenience. I never got HD Clear QAM to work but I'm about 10' away from the small screen so it looks fine even in SD.

I used coax digital out to avoid the worry of the HDMI handshake affecting audio. I see no reason for you not to do the same. I'm not entirely clear on what additional audio modes HDMI can support that coax digital can't but for me coax digital gives me all the multi channel sound formats I've ever wanted to use.

I hoped Powerstrip could help me but I pretty much didn't know what to do with it.
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post #4 of 8
8/14/08 at 1:59am
Main reason for using HDMI for the audio is for Lossless LPCM when watching Blu-Ray / HD-DVD. I could use SPDIF for everything else and that would avoid the problem, may well try that out. Out of curiosity, what AVR are you using? I have a Marantz sr7002 and I very occasionally cannot wake the TV up, and have to disconnect and re-connect
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post #5 of 8
9/17/08 at 9:00pm
I am having the same issue with my setup. Its nVidia 8500gt -> Onkyo TX-SR606 -> Panasonic 50" 720p. The PC is running all of the time because I have an XBOX MCE Extender and I set power settings to never turn off the monitor.

After powering down the TV and receiver with my harmony remote when I later power everything back on, it seems like the HDMI wont handshake and I get no video without rebooting the PC.

I am also running Vista SP1 with TV Pack and an HDHomeRun QAM digital cable tuner. I never had this problem when I was using component from the card, but I want to keep HDMI so I only need 1 cable the TV and my receiver doesn't have the greatest video conversion.

Have you guys found any way to fix this?

-Sean
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post #6 of 8
9/18/08 at 4:13am
I second a fix for this! I have already bought an expensive HDMI cable last weekend as it was among the suggestions to fix it. This didn't resolve it for me.

The most annoying moment for me is when I'm not home and VMC is starting a recording (and the TV is off). I come home an hour later and want to start watching the show that is recording at that moment. I switch on the TV and look at a black screen. At that time I can't reboot as the recording of the shows also stops at that point.
There is no other option then to wait until the recording finishes and I can reboot

I just saw that ATI has released a new driver (version 8.9) which states some fixes to HDMI issues. Did anyone try this version already?
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post #7 of 8
8/5/10 at 7:17pm
Just FTR I gave up and purchased the Gefen HDMI detective and its been working perfectly ever since.

-Sean
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post #8 of 8
8/5/10 at 7:46pm
Try it without using clone mode on the Nvidia card.

I use a TV on HMDI and a monitor on D-sub (I've had it on DVI but I have a longer d-sub cable to reach where I want the monitor) without using clone mode and both have always turned on and off correctly and they have never got messed up unless I unplug and re-plug them in. I have the desktop on the monitor and the TV just gets WMC for watching media. WMC also always starts correctly on the TV using the remote to start it.

I've used to run both at different resolutions and that worked fine too. I changed the monitor to a 16x9 model so they now both get 1080p, 60hz.

Peter
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