General usability questions
#1
so, I installed XBMC and the NPVR plugin on the same Windows7 (x64) machine -- it plays just fine (albeit with some buffering issues on occasion).. However, we decided to eat dinner and I switched off the screen (a 50" pioneer flat panel connected via HDMI) but left the machine running.. Later I came back and switched on the screen only to find the video running REALLY slowly -- almost frame by frame with no audio.. I quit XBMC and restarted it and the video was fine but the audio was still out..

I vaguely recall finding this the case when using an XBOX 360 -- where the audio would disappear IF you shut the screen/receiver off but left the XBOX on..

So, for those of you that use dedicated PCs with HDMI outputs, what methods/steps do you do when it's time to shutoff the video temporarily? Does it work as expected?

I'm a little leary at this point of turning my family loose on this until I can get a better feel for the behavior of the software in various scenarios...

Thx in advance for any insight you might have...
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#2
Once you terminate the HDMI connection, a re-establishment of the HDCP handshaking would be needed for full throughput. Unsure of what NPVR plugin references, I couldn't say if that was a causality, but was dinner good? The 'slowness' you experienced has the ring of some sort of powersaving feature, when active memory is replaced by disk cache. The audio section is most likely part & parcel to your gfx card and theoretically should just follow the video output (make sure you have an updated driver) but if live memory has been fragmented all bets are off. Power down and a reboot would be called for..

I use a script that flips displays to the TV and runs XBMC on that screen as native. On exit using the XBMC exit button the script exits XBMC and flips the displays back and if needed shuts down the PC. Alternatively I flip displays manually...
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#3
Thanks! Actually since that posting I've made numerous changes including the reinstallation of Win7 (long story).. Anyway, I also changed the BIOS settings for the video card to dramatically increase the video memory allocated to the graphics engine -- it was 64Mb and I think it put it to something like 1Gb.. Not sure if that helped in the end as I also installed, last night, an Nvidia GT430 graphics card and am now using it's HDMI output instead.

Unfortunately my other Plasma display is having fits with XBMC and live TV playback via the NPVR plugin -- video is running like a roller-coaster -- super slow (~3.5fps) then a bit later jump to 60+fps -- with everyone doing fast motion and then slow again.. However, on the same machine native use with NPVR (no XBMC) is just fine so I know it's not the video system.. Something with XBMC or the plugin.. I need to try some non-live videos to see if they exhibit the same issue or not.

Aint HDMI fun?!?
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General usability questions0