More experiences upgrading my Media Center to receive Freeview HD

author Richard Fennell calendar Nov 19, 2011 · 4 min read · Uncategorised  ·
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In my post experiences upgrading my Media Center to receive Freeview HD I said I thought the reason my Windows 7 Media Center was hanging at the "TV signal configuration” step was down to using mixed tuner cards. Well my second PCTV nanoStick T2.arrived yesterday so I was able to try the same process with a pair of identical USB T2 tuners.

Guess what? I got the same problem!

However, being USB devices it mean I could test the tuners on my laptop, a Lenovo W520 (Core i7, 16Gb, Windows 7). So I plugged them both in, they found drivers from the web automatically, I ran Media Center, select setup the TV signal and……. it worked! A few worrying pauses here and there, but it got there in about an hour.

So why did it work on a laptop and not on my Media Center PC?

I considered performance, but it seemed unlikely,the Media Center is aCore2 Duo based system about 3 years old and has had no performance problems to date. So the only difference was that the laptop had never seen a TV Tuner before, the Media Center had.

Unused drivers

So I wondered if the old Hauppauge drivers were causing the problem. Remember in Windows if you removed an adaptor card then the drivers are not removed automatically. If  the driver was automatically added (as opposed to you running a setup.exe) then there is no obvious way to removed the drivers. The way to do it as detailed in this Microsoft Answers post. When you load device manager this way you see the Hauppauge devices and you can uninstall their drivers.

And it makes no difference to the problem.

Media Center Guide Data and Tuner setup

Using task manager I could see that when Media Center TV setup appeared to hang the mcupdate.exe program was running and using a lot of CPU. I had seen this on the Lenovo, but it has passed within 30 seconds or so, on my 3 years old Intel based Media Center PC I would expect it to be a bit slower, but I left it overnight and it did not move on. So it is not just performance.

The mcupdate.exe is the tools that updates the TV guide data for Media Center. It is run on a regular basis and also during the setup. So it seems the issue as far as I can see that

  1. There is corrupt guide data so that it cannot update the channel guide
  2. There is data about a non-existent tuner that locks the process
  3. There is just too much data to update in the time allows (but you would expect leaving it overnight would fix this)
  4. There is an internet problems getting the guide (which I doubt, too much of a coincidence it happens only when I upgrade a tuner)

Simply put I think when the TV setup gets to the point it needs to access this data, it gets into a race condition with the mcupdate.exe process which is trying to update the guide.

The Hack7MC blog post seems to suggest the problem is that the guide data and tuner setup needs to be cleared down and provides a process. post suggest the problem can be addressed by cleared down the data; it provides a process to do this. However I though I would try to avoid this as I did not want really to loose the series recording settings I had if I could avoid it.

So I loaded Media Center and select update guide from the Task menu. This started the mcupdate process and  caused a 50% CPU load, and showed no sign of stopping. Again pointing to a probably one of the issues listed above. So I unloaded Media Center, but mcupdate.exe was still running as was the tool tray notification application. Again I left this a while to no effect. So I used task manager to kill mcupdate and the ectray.exe application.

I had at this point intend to run the process from the Hack7MC post, so stopped all Media Center services, but thought i would give the setup one more try. When I ran the setup TV dsignal I got a message along the lines of ‘guide data corrupt will reload’ and then the setup proceeded exactly as it should have done in the first place. I ended up will all my channels  both HD and non-HD accessible from both tuner, and all my series recording settings intact.

So a success, I am still not clear which step fixed the issue, but I am sure it was down to needing to clear down the guide data and tuner setting fully.