Suspend problem with 3 cablecards

[Barleyman]

I recently started having random problems resuming from suspend. I bought a new mystique DVB-C card in addition to two TT-1501C cards I already had.

 

What happens is that occasionally when the HTPC wakes up from suspend, one of the cards is "not enabled". Usually this comes up when wife starts yelling why she can't change channels ..

 

1st I thought it's the mystique card (Cabix C2, same as KNC) and updated the drivers and recording service (.105 => 1.6) but this didn't help. Today one of the Technotrend cards failed to enable. So it seems 3 cards are a problem for the routine that is supposed to re-enable the cards when resuming from suspend. Just going to device manager and enabling the card in question fixes the problem with no complaints.

 

System is W7 x32. I never had this problem before with various versions of recording service in about 18 months I've been using recording service.

[majstang]

So it seems 3 cards are a problem for the routine that is supposed to re-enable the cards when resuming from suspend.

Does this mean you have Configure--Hardware--Reset after Standby checked on ALL your devices or not?

[Barleyman]

Does this mean you have Configure--Hardware--Reset after Standby checked on ALL your devices or not?

 

Yeah. I could have sworn that option was missing in .105, but yes it is checked for all three cards. (In 1.60 at least)

 

I had one of the TT cards in "not enabled" status again when I checked so this seems to happen pretty often. Maybe I can work around the problem by disabling wake-up call for mystique card, let's see if it will come up gracefully after suspend.

[Barleyman]

Looks like that's not the case. I unticked mystique (#1 card in config) reset after suspend, but 2nd TT card failed to come up this time after suspend (card #3), which now completes the set.

 

Seems pretty likely to me there is a problem with either 3 cards or mixing TT and KNC cards as far as the "reset" function is concerned.

[majstang]

Seems pretty likely to me there is a problem with either 3 cards or mixing TT and KNC cards as far as the "reset" function is concerned.

To me it is pretty obvious you have some kind of driver conflict causing this problem. You can always do as the link on the top of this page says and post a support.zip or simply remove the drivers and reinstall them again to see if this fixes things.

[Barleyman]

To me it is pretty obvious you have some kind of driver conflict causing this problem. You can always do as the link on the top of this page says and post a support.zip or simply remove the drivers and reinstall them again to see if this fixes things.

 

Driver conflicts are usually resolved by pressing "enable" once in the device manager I guess I'll just try disabling "reset after suspend" for all cards next. Althought this does create actual driver "conflict" of silently generating garbage data from the TT cards after suspend if my memory serves.

 

Maybe I'll just write a script to enable all the cards post suspend.

 

Edit: Ooh shiny, new version of supporttool.exe! Too bad I can't attach anything as I've exceeded the attachment space by previous support.zips and .ts chunks and there's no obvious way to delete old attachments.

 

Edit2: Found it. Yes, I know the reset setting is not activated. I just un-ticked it.

support.zip

Edited June 1, 2010 by Barleyman

[majstang]

Driver conflicts are usually resolved by pressing "enable" once in the device manager I guess I'll just try disabling "reset after suspend" for all cards next. Althought this does create actual driver "conflict" of silently generating garbage data from the TT cards after suspend if my memory serves.

What i meant was your troubles began with installing drivers for the new mystique DVB-C card and this is also affecting your old cards...that is a alarmbell to me. Something might have gone wrong in the registry during the installation making your devices behave odd. It has happened before and remove and reinstall is always the best way to go when things like that occurs instead of trying to figure out why or what went wrong. If that wont work try to find drivers that play nice together...or better yet fix it with your scriptidea...hopefully you wont suffer from any sideeffects brought by the underlying issue you have.

[Barleyman]

What i meant was your troubles began with installing drivers for the new mystique DVB-C card and this is also affecting your old cards...that is a alarmbell to me. Something might have gone wrong in the registry during the installation making your devices behave odd. It has happened before and remove and reinstall is always the best way to go when things like that occurs instead of trying to figure out why or what went wrong. If that wont work try to find drivers that play nice together...or better yet fix it with your scriptidea...hopefully you wont suffer from any sideeffects brought by the underlying issue you have.

 

The drivers do play nice together as soon as I disabled the "reset after suspend" switch from recording service hardware tab. It also seems unlikely recording service cannot process registry information as it's not always the same card that fails to re-enable but it changes. Script would be doing just what recording service should be doing. In fact you can find in changelog many mentions WRT the reset function misbehaving.

 

I quess I'll just have to look up the command line device manager now. At least with W7 it's easy to make a scheduled task happen after resume. Hmm.. Well, to make life more difficult devcon doesn't support vista/7 officially. Apparently it works ok in x86 7 anyways and there's a x64 binary included in the windows driver kit. I had foresight not to go into 64bit bandwagon with the HTPC so I don't have to do this the hard way.

[Barleyman]

Here's a little heads-up on how to make devcon re-enable all the cablecards.

 

1st, you need a cmd file to do it, I called mine

enable cards.cmd

and put it into DVBViewer folder. It can be in my documents or whatever, I have taken ownership of program files on my computer so YMMV.

 

The devcon command to enable all DVB cards (possibly only PCI DVB-C?) is

devcon enable *0480*

 

so put that as the only line on the cmd-file.

 

In task scheduler you want to make a new task and the trigger should be

begin the task: on event

log: system

source: power-troubleshooter

event ID: 1

delay task for: 1 minute

 

Actions is "start a program" and program/script is that cmd-file.

 

If your HTPC has UAC enabled, you can skip UAC prompt (really useful on automated wake-up, eh?) by ticking "run with highest privileges" on the general tab after which it should ask you for an authorized admin password..

 

Ps. Yes, not resetting TT cards after suspend is Bad Idea.

[Barleyman]

Just a little update on this. It appears the KNC/Mystique driver may have been dodgy all along as well - I had some problems that the 2nd (TT) card was always picked over the mystique card, even althought the mystique was preferred. With other cards disabled, no dvb stream came out of the card..

 

I went to KNC one website and got latest W7 driver from there which is right now version 2.1.202.0 (March 2010) This is newer than what Mystique puts on their site (Mystique Cabix C2 = KNC One) .. Actually trying to resolve the suspend problem I "upgraded" to the 2008 driver on mystique site.

 

I have no idea if the 202 driver would have fixed the not-enabling-after suspend issue but I think it's a bit unlikely as TT cards wouldn't come up as well. It definitely fixed the "not get video from card sometimes" problem for me.