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I have a kick-ass Vista system, 64-bits version with 12 GB of RAM and lots of disk space. And it has two monitors. And I have a Hauppauge WinTV card combined with their WinTV application, which I can use to watch TV. Since one of the monitors I have also have a TV antenna and sound, I don't really use this TV thingie often so the fact that this application is a bit unstable doesn't really bother me. (It's just useful when I want to record something.)

But when I start the WinTV application and decide to drag the application from the left to the right monitor, the whole application gets in trouble for some mysterious reason often resulting in a silent crash where it just gets out of memory without a single warning. Not even a Dr. Watson report.

Well, don't want this fixed or want to use another application for this. But I wonder if this is just a bug in the application or maybe a bug in the videocard or driver. So has anyone else experienced similar problems with a dual-monitor setup and other applications that seem to access the videocard directly or do the same "magic" as WinTV does?

5 Answers 5

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I have experienced similar issues with VLC, swapping monitors while it's playing causes the image to vanish, but it recovers after a few seconds. I assume it's the recovering part WinTV is struggling with ;)

Can you get it to stop displaying the video?

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  • This sort of thing happens with 3D graphics using hardware acceleration as well. Stopping playback (or animation) while dragging between monitors is the only fix. I'm not 100% of the reason but it probably has something to do with the way the card addresses the screen to get maximum performance.
    – ChrisF
    Nov 7, 2009 at 13:47
  • It stops playing the video when dragging it. If I just turn off the TV, I can drag it without problems. But it never survives the drag when I move it while playing. I suspect faulty WinTV software but have no way to exclude a possible faulty video driver. Nov 8, 2009 at 8:19
  • It could just be that it's doing something fancy to get nice video, similar to VLC, that's not ready for screen-switching, or something. Oh well :(
    – Phoshi
    Nov 8, 2009 at 11:35
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It's almost certainly a bug in the playback application. Applications that render video need to be specially aware of multi-monitor configurations due to some limitations of the 3d rendering hardware, it's likely the playback application isn't handling this configuration properly.

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  • That's also what I suspect. Unfortunately, I only have one application that uses DirectVideo, and this software was delivered together with the hardware. It supports 64-bits Vista but it's likely it's faulty. But how to be sure it's the software and not the setup? Nov 8, 2009 at 8:24
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It could be either a bug in the graphics driver or the TV viewing program.

I would advise you upgrade both to the newest, but it really isn't possible for us to tell you.

The only other thing I can really say is to look in the event log and see if you can pull out any "faulting application" messages and look at the "faulting module" to see what caused the problem.

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  • Both are the newest drivers. Event log reports nothing. But basically, all I want to know if this is common with dual-monitor systems and applications that apparently write directly to the videocard. Nov 8, 2009 at 8:17
  • It depends how "good" the program is. If it is crashing, it most likely is written bad. For example, VLC I find is very good at multi monitors, but if you open up Windows Media Player, put any movie in it and you will see that it only plays on which screen has over 50% of the window, and it can sometimes crash if using bad codecs... it is possible that the tv program is using Direct x for drawing and it simply is written bad. You may want to try using Windows Media Center or any other program that can see the TV Card but is written better. Nov 8, 2009 at 13:24
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Things you can try:

  1. Try to set your second monitor to primary and vice versa.
  2. When moving the player to the other monitor, first press STOP, then move, then PLAY.
  3. Make sure both monitors are configured the same with(without) hardware acceleration:

image

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  • Done 1 already, made no difference. And 2 will work fine, because the software stops writing to the video directly. And 3, both monitors are set up identically. They're almost identical with the same resolution. It's just that one of them has some additiuonal features. (Samsung Syncmasters T240 and T260HD, both at 1920x1200.) Nov 8, 2009 at 8:21
  • Did you try turning off hardware acceleration for both of them?
    – harrymc
    Nov 8, 2009 at 8:53
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I don't think this is application specific or rather not the application you are trying to use. It maybe specific to the language it was written in though. I have two apps that do this when I use them;

  • SmartBear's SoapUI (a web services testing tool)
  • Tyto Software's Sahi testing automation tool

The event viewer reports:

The program java.exe version 7.0.210.11 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Action Center control panel. Process ID: 1da8

The above happens every time I move I attempt to move either of the following from one monitor to the other. Leave them on the one they open and they are fine.

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