Windows Media Center – Fix TV Not Showing Signal Automatically

hdmihdtvwindows-media-center

I have Windows Media Center running on Win7 RTM with a GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard. The integrated video card is an ATI Radeon HD 3200.

It's connected to a Sony Bravia KDL-46XBR4 tv via HDMI cable.

When I turn both on at the same time, I get great sound and video.

The issue is that when I leave the computer on and turn off the TV, the TV does not display the video or audio signal when I turn the TV back on.

  • The computer is set to never turn of the display.
  • I've tried different HDMI cables – I have two, a brand-name and a no-name cable.
  • I've tried different HDMI input ports – all have the same behavior.
  • I've tried cycling the TV to switch to different inputs and back, no dice
  • I've tried Ctrl+Alt+Delete – no dice.
  • I can confirm that the computer is running by connecting via remote desktop.

Only two things seem to work:

  • shutdown and startup
  • sleeping the computer and starting up.

Neither of those "solutions" work well, as I'm looking for a pure couch potato solution.

Best Answer

This problem seems to affect many people (as per search engines) with the most suspected/mentioned cause being insufficient drivers from ATI (NVIDIA apparently has updated its drivers for related issues successfully, while ATI tried that too, but some users still seem to have the same issue afterwards).

Consequently you might try to find updated drivers for your video card, but you should probably try the following workaround first to confirm the direction: several users are having success with a little program called hdmiOn. You could try this too by assigning a Windows shortcut key to run hdmiOn.exe whenever you lose the signal.

For more details and/or different solutions you may find e.g. this thread helpful (rather lengthy though), which is addressing a similar issue and resolution experiments.

Update:

With hdmiOn fortunately providing a workaround now, theDude19 seems to be spot on regarding the actual cause being loss of Extended display identification data (EDID), as hdmiOn.exe is exactly enforcing a resend of EDID by simply turning the monitor off and on again.

Given the simplicity of this fix one would indeed think this to be the responsibility of the video driver, however, as usual, the handshake between the involved hard- and software entities might be insufficient on all sides...

Related Question