MP and whole system randomly freezes during any activity in MP (1 Viewer)

[tim360]

I've been having these freezing issues with my MP HTPC for some time now, and they seem to have worsened since upgrading to MP 1.1 and updating all my drivers.

MP, and at many times the whole system, will freeze at random times when watching TV, video or even listening to music or navigating through menus. There seems to be no rhyme or reason. The picture will freeze and the sound will freeze on a continuous 'stutter', the only way to recover is to physically press the Reset button on the PC.

I've attached the logs of what I think was an occasion of when the freeze occurred. Any suggestions would be appreciated, as the WAF is slowly degrading each time the system freezes...


MediaPortal Version: 1.1.0.16065
MediaPortal Skin: Blue Wide
Windows Version: XP SP3
CPU Type: AMD X2 4000
HDD: Western Digital 320GB
Memory: 1GB
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA69G-S3H
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 4300
Video Card Driver: 8.762.0.0
Sound Card: Realtek HD Onboard
Sound Card AC3: Optical out
Sound Card Driver: 5.10.0.5413
1. TV Card: Hauppauge
1. TV Card Type: DVB-T
1. TV Card Driver: 7.9.1.28162
2. TV Card:
2. TV Card Type:
2. TV Card Driver:
3. TV Card:
3. TV Card Type:
3. TV Card Driver:
4. TV Card:
4. TV Card Type:
4. TV Card Driver:
MPEG2 Video Codec: Cyberlink Video/SP BD-HD PDVD 7.x
MPEG2 Audio Codec: Cyberlink Audio Renderer PDVD 7.x
h.264 Video Codec: Cyberlink H.264/AVC PDVD 7.x
Satelite/CableTV Provider:
HTPC Case: Silvertone LC17
Cooling: Nexus silent fan
Power Supply: Seasonic 430w
Remote: MCE
TV: Pioneer 42" plasma
TV - HTPC Connection: DVI

 

[jameson_uk]

Logs do not seem to show anything out of the ordinary, about what time was the freeze?

MP, and at many times the whole system

Are you saying that the freezing also happens outside of MP?

Not directly related to your issue but I did notice your tuner setup. You have your analogue tuners enabled as wel as well as DVB-IP and radio webstream. If you are not using these I would disable them in config which should make things a little cleaner. You can remove the IP one by setting the number to 0 and disable the others you are not using inside TV config.

Also I did notice when tuning you have

2010-09-02 19:31:05.828125 [(17)]: Controller:    card:2 type:DvbT is available priority:1 #users:0 same transponder:True
2010-09-02 19:31:05.828125 [(17)]: Controller:    card:3 type:DvbT channel not mapped

Are you intentionally not using the second DVB-T card either? MP thinks that the channel you are runing to can only be tuned on card 2

 

[tim360]

Thanks for the tips. I've mapped the channels for the 2nd tuner card and disabled the others not being used.

The system freezes only occur within MP, I've never experienced XP freezing while using IE - it's a dedicated HTPC so I don't use it for much else.

If I'd uploaded the correct log the freeze occurred at the last entry, although as the whole system froze and I had to restart the PC I'm not sure how much logging would occur for this event. I'll have another go at capturing another log file and add to this thread.

These freeze issues have occurred since I first built the PC, which was before the TV Tuner was installed. Things have gotten worse since updating all the drivers and moving to MP 1.1. Should I try changing the codecs I'm using?

 

[arion_p]

If during the freeze Ctrl-Alt_del does nothing, the whole system is frozen. These freezes can only be caused by:

• bugs in OS kernel code
• bugs in drivers
• defective/failing hardware (usual culprits are memory and power supply)

There is no way a user-mode application (like MP) can cause a total system freeze. It is however more probable to see such freezes when a user-mode application exercises the OS/drivers/hardware heavily, and that's what happens when using MP. IE does not use any TV drivers, does not use DirectX and may not even use enough of the system memory to cause a system hang. MP on the other hand does all of the above.

I would start with a memory test (memory modules seem to be very unreliable lately), then try rolling back/forward the TV card and/or video card drivers.

Btw: your ATI video card driver is quite old.

 

[tim360]

I've never considered memory to be a possible cause, thanks, I'll run some tests.

In the meantime I've attached two log files from today, one before a crash and one after, just in case case you can glean any other useful info that could help.

I've also tried updating the display driver - I had previously updated the full Catalyst Software Suite, but this time just tried the display driver this time. It says everything is up to date, ie version 10.8, what makes you think the driver is old?

 

[arion_p]

I've also tried updating the display driver - I had previously updated the full Catalyst Software Suite, but this time just tried the display driver this time. It says everything is up to date, ie version 10.8, what makes you think the driver is old?

Actually I did not look at dxdiag, I just saw the driver version on you specs, and assumed it was correct