Video and audio hangs/crashes at midnight

[kavics]

Hi,

 

Since I have moved from my old AMD computer to this new Intel Dual core PC I had this annoying hang/crash problem.

At the beginning it happened quite randomly after some hours of running DVBViewer. I managed to watch may be one movie without crash.

Since then I have updated many times the graphics driver and DVBViewer and the situation is better now.

However I cannot seam to get rid of this one hang/crash a day. First I have not noticed any similarity in the events, but now I know that it happens exactly at midnight.

It is quite annoying since I cannot watch or record anything what goes over midnight.

Do you have any suggestions or ideas. I was blaming/suspecting Cyberlink at the beginning since the computer crashed during blu-ray playback at specific time with specific discs. But that problem seams to be solved now. No more crashes and I have tried to use other filters like FFDShow.

Now I suspect Catalyst or DVBViewer.

 

By the way blu-ray. Is there any support for blue-ray playback in DVBViewer? I understood it should work if I have Cyberlink or other blue-ray player but it does not work on my PC. Or does it work only on Windows Vista/7?

 

Regards,

Jozsef Kohegyi

support.zip

PCinfo.txt

[majstang]

Try uninstall Catalyst 9.11 and download/install Catalyst 9.4. You can read more about this issue at ATI forum.

[majstang]

That was the quick n easy version. Im currently doing some experimenting myself regarding this issue. I think it is really bad a lot of WinXP users suffers from some kind of misstake ATI did with their driver when going from the last stable one 9.4 to 9.5. Every version up til the latest one 9.12 have the crashing issue and they seem not be abled to get it fixed. It is somewhat miserable we are forced to use an old driver to make things work as it should and doing so we miss out on new features and bugfixes.

Lately im leaning against this issue being caused by conflicts between new drivers and old driver leftovers. ATI seem to be lazy enough to not offer us some kind of driver removal tool like the one they had many years ago. Anyway, i have been trying many things to get 9.12 stable and the latest things i did is really promising so far. My WinXP install is an really old one and i have probably had 30 earlier Catalyst versions installed and uninstalled during time, cluttering my registry and leaving old unused files in my Windows directory. Same thing with my Realtek audio.

 

I decided to do some radical cleaning of the system and if you for some good reason not wanna use Catalyst 9.4 these are the steps i took:

First download two tools that will be needed:

A.) DirectX End-User Runtimes (August 2009)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

B.) Guru3D - Driver Sweeper

http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

 

DirectX End-User Runtimes redist a tip from Gioxy should be (re)applyed every time you change anything that involve the DirectX chain (eg install/uninstall codecs, video/audio drivers and so on...)

Driver Sweeper a tip from dvbrewer analyzes and removes driver leftovers after ATI, NVIDIA, Creative and Realtek.

 

1) Uninstall hardware drivers for video and sound using Add/Remove Apps through the controlpanel. Your ATI HDMI driver however should be removed from the Device Manager (right click--properties--uninstall).

2) After rebooting run the Driver Sweeper on the leftovers by first analyze whats there and clean out everything you find (for the drivers you removed in step 1). You may be forced to run the sweeper in safe mode to remove every entries and files assosiated with the old drivers, cuz some of them cant be removed in normal mode. Also remove the Creative entry that should show up when using the Driver Sweeper. That file is associated with the ATI HDMI driver.

3) After reboot reinstall your drivers for video and sound. For ATI you must find and install the ATI HDMI driver separate, since its not included in the Catalyst driver package for WinXP, which im sure you already know.

4) Now run the DirectX End-User Runtimes

5) Time to evaluate your results

6) If your crashing issues continues the only option for you would be to format and reinstall WinXP. You said that you have changed some hardware and i dont know if you simply switched the components and kept your old WinXP install? If so you really should start from scratch all together, which is the proper thing to do especially if changing motherboard.

 

Good luck!

majstang

Edited January 16, 2010 by majstang

[majstang]

Nope! Catalyst 9.12 crashed my WinXP today (sound loops, PC unresponsive and im forced to do a hard reboot), so the above did not work...back to 9.4 again

[McenterFreak]

Nope! Catalyst 9.12 crashed my WinXP today (sound loops, PC unresponsive and im forced to do a hard reboot), so the above did not work...back to 9.4 again

It is hard to be an IT Armish

Why not move to where you need to move one day anyway, Win 7

[Dakkar]

Is this a specific issue of WindowsXP?

Because I have the same problems also with Win7!!!

Should I isntall Catalyst 9.4 also in Win7?

To do that it's enough to uninstall the current Catalyst and reinstall the 9.4 or should I reinstall the entire OS?

 

Dakkar

[majstang]

Yes, its a WinXP specific issue with Catalyst 9.5 to 9.12. I would not install catalyst 9.4 if I were you on Win7, cuz it should be one of the first Win7 drivers released from ATI and if i remember it right they were quite shaky to say at least. Better to try and remove/reinstall latest Catalyst version along with your BDA drivers (for your tuner) to see if that has any effect on your issue before even thinking of reinstalling Win7.

[kavics]

Hi,

 

This is very frustrating.

 

I have upgraded Catalyst to 9.12, TechnoTrend to 5.0.1.8 and Gigabyte to 4.65.0.0 drivers.

I know it is too much at the same time but Catalyst update requires 2 restarts and the others one, and I do not want to spend all my time with this.

 

The good news is that after this the midnight hanging bug disappeared.

 

The bad news is that after this I am not able to play MKV files. I have Ice Age 1,2,3 and before the upgrade I have watched 2 and 3 without problems. After upgrade I was not able to watch 1 and when I tried 2 and 3 they had the same problem. Video is slow or sticky and picture brakes up to blocks, not able to watch. I have tried to play with different filters but no help. I tried BlueRay disk and that plays fine. Another problem is that now once the computer crashed once totally and sometimes the video driver crashes and once I got the video freezing (not at midnight).

 

I have been thinking if I should migrate to Win7 but is it really any better? And if I migrate do I need DVBViewer any more? I think in Win7 the media center can handle TV cards and even BlueRay disks.

 

I have also started to think if it is better to just to buy standalone equipments and abandon the PC as a media center project.

 

Now I try Catalyst 10.1. Let´s see what happens. There has to bee a lot of bugs in the Catalyst frivers since they release a new one on every week almost.

 

Is NVIDIA any better?

 

I had the following Catalyst drivers:

8.12,9.2,9.4,9.5,9.6,9.7,9.9,9.11,9.12

Non of them worked fine.

Edited February 6, 2010 by kavics

[majstang]

Yes, migrating to Win7 is not a bad idea, but using media centre instead of DVBViewer is for sure My opinion is that DVBViewer has so much more to offer and the best part, for me, is it is so easy customizable like no other Media-software. Like a devoted DVBViewer fan would say anything otherwise

 

There are people that reports about crashing issues with Win7 as well and most of them have Nvidia cards. ATI cards/drivers have their fair share of troubles on Win7 as well, but no crashing issues according to this forum anyway (i may have missed some reports far back).

 

If you decide to stick with WinXP and your crashing issues with Catalyst drivers continues, im afraid you have no other choice besides to format and reinstall WinXP from sratch. I came to that conclusion myself the other day, also based on other instability issues i had, and begun from scratch completly. Since then my HTPC has been ROCK STABLE in every way, but ATI Catalystwise i still use 9.4...why mess around with something that works great and im not keen on installing something new from ATI since they seem to have lost their way completly and releases drivers that do not work satisfying at all, at least for WinXP.

Edited February 6, 2010 by majstang