weird media center crash

[Getho]

howdy, I'm new here great to find an australian mce community

weird behaviour: when I make media centre full screen (on either my main monitor or TV) the program seems to get into a loop – the screen goes blank, mouse pointer flickers. When I full screen on main monitor I can ctrl-alt-del and the screen comes back in the background (but when it gets focus it goes back to black flickering). When I full screen on the TV, Ctrl-alt delete doesn't cut it and I have to hard-reset. The screen is clack but with distorted band that jumps and flickeres now and then. When I disable the TV in display settings MC opesn OK on my monitor (but weirdly when I fullscreen it the menu bar is NOT at the very top of the screen -it is inset on all sides).

Using aver tv, overlay on tv works fine (as it does with media player). I've tried various setting in catalyst control center, tried doing the setup again of media center, but otherwise I'm stumped. It feels like media center is freaking out with refresh rate or resolution, but I cant find any setting that would override what is set in the video driver.

Any ideas?

[ozbear]

It's been some time since I used MCE so I cannot rememeber if the sequence is the same in MCE as it is in Vista, but when you go through the setup from Settings | TV | Configure Your TV or Monitor | and eventually get to the Display Resolution panel, select List All Modes and select whatever your desktop is using. You might have accidentally chosen something weird for a refresh rate.

Have you checked your event logs to see if anything interesting in there has been reported?
Are your drivers up to date?
Can you run Media Center in a window on your monitor, as opposed to full screen.

Oz

[Getho]

Hi Ozbear,

Yes I can use media centre on my monitor as long as I dont have the tv setup in the display driver. It will run in a window or fullscreen, but as soon as I enable the TV in the driver - even if media centre is still running on my monitor - it freaks.

I downloaded the windows xp video decoder checker utility and there were only 2 decoders in there (from aver media), both with x's next to them, so I'm wondering if its an issue with that (I found this after totally unistalling video drivers, clearing registry and re-installing - twice!)

I'll download windvd later to see if that fixes it, but what you were saying about the tv setup using an incorrect setting also sounded plausible - problem is - how do you re-install media centre without totally reinstalling windows?
thanks!

[Getho]

just thought I'd update this myself, in case anyone else has the same problem: this worked:
http://www.salloway.org.uk/mediacenter/util/

when I re-ran the setup it all worked fine. I wish I'd found this before:
re-installing the video drivers (several times), installing windows genuine advantage (2 versions as the first one didn't work) to get the video decoder checker utility, which showed I needed a new video decoder, reinstalling windvd, running another repair tool I found via this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archi...20/483215.aspx, as well as many joyless hours spent online searching for answers. IT would've been cheaper to go out and buy a hardisk recorder. Ok moan over