Vista - Picture but no sound

Krusty_Clown

Hi Guys,

In some ways my Vista experience is getting better (finally have a working combination for ReadyBoost, and it takes about 2-3 seconds to awaken from sleep mode) but I'm having some big problems too, so I'm looking for any suggestions you may have.

Problem #1: When watching Live or Recorded TV through Vista Media Centre I am no longer getting any sound. Picture is fine, but the sound is gone. My music collection plays fine, my AVIs (Xvid, DivX) all play fine, but live TV or Recorded TV doesn't produce any sound at all. When playing Recorded TV through Windows Media Player, the sound works fine! Very frustrating. The only thing I have installed (and subsequently de-installed) since before this problem ocurred is VLC media player, and I think I may have installed this after the problem started happening.

I'm using Microsoft's video and audio decoders (but have also tried nVidia's). No joy. I do use an SPDIF pass-through, but as I said, it's working fine for music, and AVI content. Any suggestions, or diagnostic tips? Running the speaker test produces no sound, however, as I said, music etc plays fine, so it's not a mute, or physical connection issue.

Problem #2: External USB hard drive. I'm using a Western Digital iBook for all of my media. The problem is that the USB connection keeps intermittently dropping, which puts the CPU into a 100% usage cycle, and everything slows to a crawl, and I get a menu which suggests that there is a fault with the Hard drive. Scanning the HD reports that here are no problems. I'd be tempted to say that this is a hardware issue, but it worked fine with MCE2005. any suggestions?

Problem #3: As I mentioned, I keep most of my media on an external USB HD (Movies, Music, photos). When I browse the movies folder (or music, or photos) it takes an age to produce the thumbnails. Does it have to generate these every time in real-time, or can these not be cached, as in MCE2005?

That's all for now... Thanks!

Krusty_Clown

K. I solved #1 by re-installing the on-board sound card drivers. Not update drivers, the exact same drivers.. Go figure..
If you're having the same problem, (RealTek AC97) then you can get the drivers here.

8T8

For the USB problems do you have an NVIDIA chipset ?

Thumbnail generation is another tricky area some codecs are not working right with Vista media centre and cause long delays when playing the files or generating thumbnails especially MP4 & MKV containers.

Are you using any of those types of media ?

Krusty_Clown

No, it's not an nVidia chipset, but I applied that USB knowledge base patch anyway. Still no change..

The thumbnail issue is frustrating..Used to be fine on MCE2005.. Is there anyway to prevent the thumbnail generation (which would be unfortunate, but better than the wait), or force a static list of thumbnails, instead of generating them on the fly? The problem is somewhat compounded by the fact that this meda is on the external USB hard drive.

8T8

You wont stop the thumbnail's generation unless you disable the actual service unfortunately there is no list view though the small view can fit more on screen.

The slow thumbnail generation I have only observed if using non-official formats like FLV, MP4 & MKV even if you have directshow codecs installed even if you have thumbnail creation disabled in the MP4/MKV splitter (a pref in Haali Media Splitter).

It seems okay with AVI, MWV, MPG, DVR-MS containers.

I have a feeling it is tied to WMP in some manner but not yet looked into it deeply as the WMP in Vista is heavily tied into media centre more so than WMP/MCE under XP, or it could be newer codecs are required for it work properly. First go into WMP\options\library tab and untick "delete files from computer when deleted from library" now go back into WMP normal view and switch to the video library, to get folder view click on the drop down arrow next to the library text string {e.g Video-Library-All Video} you will see folders shared out if the external drive is there right click and select remove from library WMP should prompt to remove from library only or delete of course select remove only. Now go back into Media centre and see if the thumbnails are still slow to generate there is also a chance the folder will no longer be shared out in Media centre because of the way WMP is tied into it so you will have to share it out again.

In regards the AC3 stuff are you using AC3 Filter as that isn't working right in Vista might be related, I would recommend using the CCCP pack as the decoder for video content at least.


Anyway if you want to disable thumbnail generation run this from the command line/run box however this will disable thumbnails system wide (note this was for XP but I think it's the same in Vista).

regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll

to put it back use

regsvr32 shmedia.dll

Krusty_Clown

There are two mp4's altogether, the rest are XVid/DivX (AVI).
What I was wondering was would it be possible to use something to generate a Folder.jpg for each of the folders, and have MCE use this as the thumbnail, rather than taking a frame from the media itself (kind of like the Music approach).

Do you keep your media in a flat directory structure 8T8, or is it one folder holds-all?

I'll give the CCCP pack a go.. Thanks!

8T8

Yeah it's the MP4's that are probably the cause when Vista media centre comes across unsupported file types but with a directshow codec present it tries to read the file & generate a thumbnail.

This I believe is what causes the slowdown as thumbnails work in Vista's explorer though it depends on the splitter, codec & file like Nero works for some thumbnails of MP4's and doesn't for others, same goes for Haali. Media centre must be sufficiently different in some manner that causes these issues.

At the moment there doesn't seem to be a 100% working solution but I'm hoping Nero will come to the rescue as Haali the author of Haali Media Splitter doesn't have any intention to support Vista or media centre. CoreAVC though he has a working relationship with which may force his hand so to speak as they are testing against Vista and media centre but they are very slow with new releases.

Note that you can delete the the thumbnail data as well it is stored under
c:\users\username\appdata\local\microsoft\windows\explorer

This will force them to be re-generated. it might help as I have noticed Vista to store incorrect thumbnails in some experiments I was performing with codecs.

I keep my Media in a directory structure like My Shows\My Name Is Earl etc. & share out the My Shows folder. Thing is that Vista generates thumbnails as well from these folders & I've noticed it pause over folders that contain shows in MP4 or MKV containers as well.