I just got a new Yamaha RXV465 Receiver and it seems to exposed the HD Timing bug beyond just NBC. My setup is WMC7 with an nVidea G Force 9400 GT, HD Homerun, and Samsung 550 series TV. When the receiver is in active mode there are a number of channels that flicker similar to the way that people have described it flickering for NBC. However, when the receiver is passive, or in HDMI pass through mode, there is no flickering. There is also no flickering when the video signal is connected directly to the television.
The one workaround I was thinking is directly linking the HDMI to the TV and then running audio to the receiver via optical SPDIF.
Any other ideas?
Thanks,
Your Samsung is going to do a much better job of upscaling than your receiver. Just leave it on passthrough. That's what I do with my RXV1065 and Sammy 550 series.
edit: On briefly skimming the 465 manual, it looks like "pass-through" on that model and "passthrough" on the 1065 may be two different things. On mine, you can have the receiver decode the HDMI audio while "passing through" the video to your display with no vid processing. If that were possible on your model, that would be the solution, but it's not clear to me that it is on the 465. If that's the case then optical to the Yammy and HDMI to the Sammy would be a solution assuming your source doesn't pass anything requiring advanced audio codecs, such as TrueHD and DTS HD MA.
I have the 565 and don't have any issues with it, I assume you have the dynamic contrast off in your video drivers and have tried swapping HDMI cables?
WOW! Thanks for really diggin into this. I spent some time last night trying to figure out how to go about bypassing the video processing and came up empty handed. I am not sure on the advanced audio codecs thing. The HTPC does have a BD player. Would I be losing audio features by falling back to the optical audio connection?
An additional observation/clue on the issue; It only happens when WMC is full screen, and never when playing a DVD through WMC. The only difference I can come up with between full screen and non full screen is the resolution. When non full screen it runs at 1920x1080 and when full it is 1920x1080i. Could the interlacing have something to do with it?
I had a problem that sounds just like yours. Mine was with a Harman Kardon and the 9400m NVidia on-board graphics of my Gigabyte motherboard. I tried a GeFOrce 210 with the same results. I ended up using an ATI video card and the problem went away.
In fact, my temporary solution was to not play in full screen, as you observed.
My related posts:
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/p/80804/401364.aspx#401364
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/p/79383/398966.aspx#398966
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/p/78878/398932.aspx#398932
Actually, the last posts on this thread indicate a solution that fixes the NVidia problem rather than changing to ATI. I am going to try it on my NVidia because ATI is not without its warts.
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/79383.aspx
If that didn't work I suggest trying an ATI card. The only issue I have with the ATI card, once you find the hidden setting adjust the scaling so that the image fills the display, is that after I power down my reveiver and power on again the display is set to a standard television aspect rather than wide screen. All I do is click the windowed button (rectangle in the upper right) of the Media Center Window and then click it again to return to full screen and everything is good.
Looking back at the thread I had indicated, the following was suggested:
"To eliminate this on Nvidia videocards, set the "Color Adjustments" for your card to "With the Video Player Settings"."
I have not tried it yet as I can't bring the system down until Friday.
I pulled my ATI card, reinstalled the Nvidia driver, checked the settings per the referenced threads and I still have a problem with the blanking screen. I am putting my ATI card back in.