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[Aimhere]

Hi,

I'm a longtime user of MC. Currently running the latest forum release (21.0.90) on a Windows 10 PC as a home theater. The PC is using integrated Intel HD 4400 video with a Core i3 4170 CPU, which ought to be plenty powerful enough. I am using the latest available video and audio drivers, and audio is using the Intel display audio driver in WASAPI mode.

I recently decided to add an over-the-air TV tuner to my setup. Got a Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD, which is a dual-tuner (ATSC) USB device. it is connected to a flat-panel OTA antenna which I know gets a good signal on all local channels.

When watching Live TV full-screen in Media Center, channel-changes (whether using up/down or direct numeric entry) are very ugly... things like brief looping of audio and/or video, and/or video freezing while audio plays, and/or the new-channel audio starts playing before the video, and/or the new-channel video plays at an accelerated rate for a couple of seconds before settling down to normal speed. Altogether, it may take as long as 5 seconds to fully stabilize, regardless of which channel was originally playing or which was newly-selected.

What's more, often the new channel's video doesn't appear at all... I just see a mostly-black screen, sometimes with a line or two of garbage at the top, while the audio plays normally. When this happens, I can usually get it working again by changing channels again. Sometimes, I get an error message from Windows saying "The display driver stopped responding and has recovered", then the video reappears. And sometimes, Media Center itself becomes unresponsive and I need to use Task Manager to end it.

I do not have any of these problems using Hauppauge's own WinTV version 8. When changing channels, the WinTV software will merely freeze the video AND mute the audio for a few seconds until the signal stabilizes behind-the-scenes, then resume live playback cleanly. (I wish MC would do channel changes this way.)

I am attaching a log I just generated. I enabled logging, then started watching television while changing channels up-or-down with my MCE remote. Towards the end, I experienced the screen blanking out and not returning on its own, so I stopped the live playback and copied the log. [Edit: it wouldn't let me post the entire log, so I trimmed away the early part, before the blanking happened. Hopefully there is enough to troubleshoot.]

I'm using Red October Standard video, with hardware acceleration and VideoClock both enabled. I tried disabling hardware acceleration, which seems to help with the screen-blanking and "driver recovered" issue, but channel-changes remain pretty ugly. And as one might expect, with hardware acceleration disabled, my CPU usage (as viewed in Task Manager) jumps from an average of 10% to something more like 30%. I guess I can try running it this way for awhile for the sake of stability, but what can I do about the ugly channel-changing?

Aimhere

[RoderickGI]

Yes, the channel changing can look a bit ugly. It only takes a couple of seconds maximum for me though, using a PCIe quad tuner card.

The ugly bit is a combination of locking on to the channel and synchronising the audio and video stream, I believe. MC simply doesn't hide that, while other software does. I don't think that is a particularly bad thing.

Note, when you post a log, you really should post the whole zip file that MC creates and puts on the Desktop, as it has both the previous and current logs, and system info, all of which can be useful, particularly if you get a crash while testing. The forum should let you post the zip file unless it is huge, which it usually isn't if you are testing the way you did.

[Aimhere]

Yes, the channel changing can look a bit ugly. It only takes a couple of seconds maximum for me though, using a PCIe quad tuner card.

The ugly bit is a combination of locking on to the channel and synchronising the audio and video stream, I believe. MC simply doesn't hide that, while other software does. I don't think that is a particularly bad thing.

Note, when you post a log, you really should post the whole zip file that MC creates and puts on the Desktop, as it has both the previous and current logs, and system info, all of which can be useful, particularly if you get a crash while testing. The forum should let you post the zip file unless it is huge, which it usually isn't if you are testing the way you did.

I understand that, but I think I initially tried putting it inline as code, exceeding the maximum post size. So I edited it to trim off the early part before adding it as an attachment to the post. It didn't occur to me to ZIP it up to compress it first, my bad!

I do wish MC gave the option of hiding the ugly part of the channel-change. No other software I've seen does it in such a "raw" form like MC, and I think it looks unprofessional, frankly.

[DocLotus]

I agree totally.

The ugly, often slow & sometimes weird sound during channel change held me back from MC TV for many years as WMC was soo much smoother, faster & professional in how it changed channels.

Sad to say WMC is no more with Win 10 so I really have no other choice but to "suffer" along with JRTV channel weirdness.

As I have stated many times before in other threads I really wish something could be done to fix this one really big irritant. Compared to WMC JRTV channel changing is very crude. This is so big a deal for me as to make it my NUMBER ONE overall complaint about MC. Fixing this biggie would make me one very happy camper indeed as MC is in most other respects the very best there is.

I want to see something like WMC channel change where they mute the sound & freeze the video until the new channel is ready & it then just shows up (very clean & quickly).