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Vista Media Center Debugging

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I've been running Windows Vista on my TV media center for a few months now. Just after I did the initial install it started exhibiting a strange problem which took me all day Saturday to resolve and I had thought the resolution was correcting a BIOS setting. Well, yesterday there was a short power cut at home and when the machine booted back up the problem had come back.

The problem is that when you watch live TV or a recorded show the video is just black and you only hear 10 seconds of audio. Then the audio goes silent as well, but the media appears to be still playing as evidenced by the time position still moving forward. This problem does not occur unless Media Center is full screen on my Panasonic TV. Playback is fine full screen on the VGA LCD screen and also fine non-maximized on the Panasonic TV. When this first happened we spent a couple of weeks watching TV in a large but not maximized window on the TV.

See my previous article on this setup for the equipment I have, I've no idea what causes this but it's likely to be specific to some hardware or software combination that I have.

Yesterday I was able to resolve it much quicker. Here's what I had to do. If you have this problem, perhaps this will help.

  1. Reconfigure the two screens in display properties. They were set to the wrong resolutions and no longer side by side. I also have to choose the Panasonic TV resolution from the "List All Modes" button to find it's 720x480 native ED resolution. This doesn't correct the black video and 10 second audio problem.
  2. Shut down the machine and boot up with the HDMI cable unplugged from the motherboard. This machine has HDMI built in on the motherboard which is how I'm driving the Panasonic TV.
  3. Once the machine is booted up and I am logged in, plug in the HDMI cable to the motherboard.
  4. Go through display properties to add the new display to extend the screen real estate.
  5. Now playback works again. Note that I can shut down normally and reboot without losing playback.

If anyone happens to know why this happens, drop me a blog comment or email.