MCE hanging during My Movies playback

[Mike]

Throwing this out there in case someone has seen or heard of a similar symptom:

I have had my MCE machine hang while watching a DVD under My Movies and then the screen goes dark and the TV says searching for signal. The PC is still on, but I need to reboot it. Everything is fine for awhile but I have seen the pattern repeat itself a few times.

I saw a reference to hitting stop when you are not using it, and I have been doing that.

In the meantime I switched to watching things through My Videos to see if it repeats there (to isolate the problem).

Any thoughts?

 

[electron]

Are you playing the movie using the disc, ISO, or the VOB files?
Do you have the latest windows updates installed (especially the MCE ones)? What happens when you play the movie in windows media player, or play it with the Nvidia DVD decoder, do you have the same issues?
What video card are you using, and how is it connected to the TV (if HDTV, what res are you running)?

 

[Mike]

Are you playing the movie using the disc, ISO, or the VOB files?

VOB files

Do you have the latest windows updates installed (especially the MCE ones)?

Fully patched on all accounts (the machine is only a few weeks old). I'll go through microsoft.com again to make sure there are no additional ones that don't get pushed out that I missed, but I believe I checked that when I set the machine up (looked at media center edition downloads).

What happens when you play the movie in windows media player, or play it with the Nvidia DVD decoder, do you have the same issues?

I have not tried it in media player. Keep in mind the issue is not repeating frequently (once every few days). The PC is always on, it is recording a few TV shows (only one or two atm I haven't fully switched over from TV yet) and I generally watch two episodes of 24 for example, a night. I'll watch the timing more but it seems like every few days it happens in the middle of playing it.

What video card are you using, and how is it connected to the TV (if HDTV, what res are you running)?

The card:

Gigabyte GV-R96X128D Radeon 9600 XT AGP 8X 128MB DDR Video Card w/TV-Out & DVI Retail

It is on the approved list, and has the latest drivers and such (I saw issues earlier using Gigabyte downloads which were out of date and found updated ones at the ATI/Radeon site).

It is connected to the TV via VGA.

I'm using 800x600 (I think, I'll check when I get home) at the moment (lowered it for ease of reading when on the 'normal pc screens') could this be part of the issue? It has one higher setting if I remember correctly 1280 x 720 perhaps?. The TV is a Samsung 61" DLP. There is no traditional PC monitor connected.

 

[electron]

do you know what the max res of that TV is? if it can do 1080i, you better bump up that resolution, it will make MCE look much better

Do you know what your system temps are? I would keep a watch on those as well, as it seems to occur when there is a lot of activity. Do you have the latest ATI drivers installed? What about the event log, is there anything in there?

 

[Mike]

Thanks. The resolution of the TV goes up to 1280 x 720 (looked it up). I will bump that up.

Great point on the temps, I will install the probes to check that (Asus motherboard) as that would make a lot of sense. When I built it, I put some of the best cooling in that was available at the time (swiftech cpu heat sink), so I did not consider that. I think you are on to something though. Maybe I need to remove the heat sink and check the thermal paste used (it was put together a few years ago, maybe there was something I could have done better here). There are multiple fans in the machine, I'll verify all are working.

I do know the latest ATI drivers are installed as that resolved another issue I had seen earlier. I did check the event log when it happened and there were no entries (which would also point to the temperature as a possible culprit).

Thanks!

 

[Mike]

An update: I installed the probe software to monitor the motherboard and cpu heat, but got nothing out of line.

I had also starting watching my DVD's using My videos rather than My Movies.

I did see an issue where started to hang, then switched to the desktop for a moment and then continued playing. Switching to the desktop, I saw a message the the video card was reset because it stopped responding.

I'm guessing that it is the same issue, but My Movies for some reason does not allow it to reset.

I'll post more once I track down this video card resetting issue, which seems to be tied to the video card. I've never seen this with nvidia cards....