I have been having a proble with a particular brand of tv tuner cards and using standby. It is with an ATI TV Wonder 650. This is an ATSC/NTSC hybrid tuner.The basic symptom is that in a MCE2005 machine with two of these cards installed (an officially supported configuration) only one of the two will work after you resume from standby. I was wondering if there was any way you know to "refresh" a driver to make it work after standby? I have a ticket in with ATI/AMD support, but being it is ATI that has to probably fix their driver I thought it would be worth a try to fix it some other way as well. I have installed the MST, but so far it is still the same upon resuming from standby. The "watch" tuner won't work at all while the "record" tuner works fine. The only way I have found to get both working again is to restart the computer. Thanks for any ideas you may have.

Right now I am testing with killing ehrecv.exe at suspend.

This is the service that handles the tuner cards, this way they get re-initialised at suspend/resume. Maybe this might help.

If I were to kill ehrecv before I put it into standby and then test it, would that help you out any?

Yep, let me know your results.

I have a version of MST which does this, I am doing a testrun tonight to see how MCE reacts.

Good and bad. First the good. It woke up to make a scheduled recording like it was supposed to even after killing ehrecvr. The bad is the "watch" tuner still didn't work. The recording turned out fine, but if it had to record two shows the second show to start would not have worked because the "watch" tuner just doesn't work upon resuming. I also have the same response if I wake it up manually when no recording is needed. It is always the same tuner that won't work, and when I switch the tuners it makes difference (I actually returned two of them). It is a real problem with their driver I guess. If you can think of anything else or want me to try something just let me know. Thanks!

Yes, I've now run it for 2 days without MST and stability has returned, no lockups of MCE and no display corruption on Frontview. The version of MST is the latest one v0.9.49 beta.
Frontview is version 4 (which is the latest version), driving an Imon USB display, if that makes any difference.

The lockups happened like this: Watching LiveTV while recording on the other tuner. When the recording finishes, the Live TV goes to the "No TV signal" screen (but there still is a TV signal on my set top box). Changing to any channel shows "No TV signal". Going to the MCE main menu then causes it to lock up completely, power down required to get it back.

Machine is Asus M2NPV-VM m/b with Athlon64 processor and Cinergy 2400i dual DVB-T tuner.

The Frontview problem has returned after 3 days of not happening - so it is not MCE Standby causing it. It happened after playing a DVD so it might be something to do with AnyDVD... maybe...

denyart

Microsoft made a kind of command-line version of the device manager called devcon.
You can make a script that stops, starts or recycles the driver of your card.

Use something like Hibernate trigger http://www.rpi.edu/~desimn/suspendtrigger/ to run the script at suspend and/or resume.

Congoblue

You can find a testbuild of MST here: http:www.xs4all.nl/~hveijk/mst/files/mst0951t.zip
Could you please try that one?

Okay, I'll try it. I just noticed in the event viewer that the attempt to kill the ehrecvr service may not have produced what I thought. I killed it from Task Manager, and it said in the log that it stop unexpectedly and would restart in 5000msec. So it was probably already running again when the computer actually went into standby. So my little test may not have proved anything.

"Your videocard is probably not fully restored for suspend when MST starts ehome.
Try increasing the "Delay before starting ehome" in the "Debug" tab."

Hi, I had this problem too and increasing the delay time got rid of the video card error message. But now I have a new problem when I wake from S3 suspend. The MCE Remote does not seem to work. The light on the receiver comes on when I press a button, but ehome does not seem to respond. If I move the mouse, then I can get the remote to work again, but this is not an ideal fix since I wanted to control everything with just the remote (wife acceptance factor). Any suggestions on what to do? I have installed the Rollup2 update. Thank you for providing a great piece of software.

MCE Standby Tool 0.9.54, Improved idle detection

This release contains the usual bug fixes and minor improvements.

The most important new feature is one I have had many request for. This new idle detection puts the system standby when the media center application is running and there in no activity. Even if live TV is still being buffered. Of course active recordings will be finished first.

MST now runs on Windows Vista and server 2003. On Vista I have done hardly any testing yet, so it is not clear which functions will work and which are of any use. In future versions Vista compatibility will be improved.

As allways, don't hesitate to ask questions or give suggestions,

Herman

The new version can be found on my homepage: http://www.xs4all.nl/~hveijk/mst/indexe.htm

@Yovinman

Do you have a nVidia videocard? This version contains a fix which might help.
__________________

hveijk:

denyart

Microsoft made a kind of command-line version of the device manager called devcon.
You can make a script that stops, starts or recycles the driver of your card.

Use something like Hibernate trigger http://www.rpi.edu/~desimn/suspendtrigger/ to run the script at suspend and/or resume.

Congoblue

You can find a testbuild of MST here: http:www.xs4all.nl/~hveijk/mst/files/mst0951t.zip
Could you please try that one?

I am also having the same problem as denyart. I tried out devcon utility to restart, disable, and enable both ATI 650 cards. The problem is DevCon reports that a restart is required after any of these 3 commands are executed against any of the 2 tuners. Any ideas?

Some drivers just require a reboot (often poor driver design, I don’t expect this to be the case with ATI).

Did you run devcon while eHome (the MCE Shell) was running or without?

Maybe this keeps the tuners locked.

Try the devcon trick after you have closed eHome and once before you have started it (just to find out if it maybe doesn’t close the devices properly).

You could also try to kill the ehrecvr.exe process before using devcon, this is the MCE process that handles the tuners.

I have plans to include devcon support in my tool for a long time. If these tests bring something up I will try include it in my implementation.

hveijk:

Some drivers just require a reboot (often poor driver design, I don’t expect this to be the case with ATI).

Did you run devcon while eHome (the MCE Shell) was running or without?

Maybe this keeps the tuners locked.

Try the devcon trick after you have closed eHome and once before you have started it (just to find out if it maybe doesn’t close the devices properly).

You could also try to kill the ehrecvr.exe process before using devcon, this is the MCE process that handles the tuners.

I have plans to include devcon support in my tool for a long time. If these tests bring something up I will try include it in my implementation.

hveijk,

Thanks for the advice! I forgot about ehrecvr.exe, and after stopping the service (note that killing it forces it to restart), I was able to restart both ATI 650 tuners!!!

SUCCESS!!! This is the unofficial workaraound for ATI 650 standby problem:

1. Download DevCon http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272/ and extract it to C:\devcon
2. Download HibernateTrigger http://www.rpi.edu/~desimn/suspendtrigger/ and install it.
3. If ATI 650 are the only ATI cards in your system, skip to step 5.
4. If you have other ATI cards in your system, you may want to restart only the 650 tuners. For this, open command line window and run: devcon find PCI\* - this will produce a list of all local devices. Find ATI Unified AVStream Driver, and note the device IDs for your 2 tuners. In step 5, replace PCI\VEN_1002* with a similar string that will identify only the ATI 650 tuners.
5. Create C:\devcon\ati650.bat file with the following contents:

net stop "Media Center Receiver Service"
devcon restart PCI\VEN_1002*
net start "Media Center Receiver Service"

6. Open HibernateTriger, and type C:\devcon\ati650.bat in what you want to execute on resume.

Enjoy dual ATI 650 with stand by support!!!

Great!

I will take this in account when designing the devcon support.

Herman