Troubleshooting Solutions
- further information: Troubleshooting Guide
This page will provide links to step-by-step guides with additional common troubleshooting steps. It is intended to provide targeted solutions to common issues we encounter with Media Center performance, and should be used only after following the instructions on the general Media Center Troubleshooting Guide. Before you post about your issue on Interact, please ensure that you have first worked through the steps provided on that page.
The solutions provided on this page are not all general purpose guides (not everyone should do all of these things), but we will try to cover the most common cases.
Tame Your Anti-Virus
Applies To:
- Potentially all issues
Description:
If, after testing, you've determined that the problem does lie with your Anti-Virus application, you'll want to set it to "exclude" a set of locations and programs that are used by MC and need to perform well. We can't, obviously, address every single AV application out there, but we'll use Windows Defender as an example. If you don't have Windows Defender, you want to try to exclude the same "things" in your own particular AV application.
Guides:
Check Your Audio Setup
Applies To:
- Potentially all issues
Description:
A frequent cause of trouble is a misconfigured, or misbehaving, audio device. If you've messed with a bunch of settings in there, or you are using a more esoteric hardware setup, then you might just have to tweak something.
Guides:
Check Your Video Setup
Applies To:
- Video playback issues
Description:
If the issue is with Video Playback, it is worth checking over your Video setup as well.
Guides:
Check Your Drivers
Applies To:
- Audio and Video playback issues
- Theater View issues
- Crashing
- Blue-screen and Kernel Panic crashes
Description:
Buggy drivers can cause all sorts of problems. The most common culprits are Audio and Video device drivers, but it is worth checking through all of your main system devices and make sure the drivers are in good shape.
Guides:
Troubleshoot Issues with Slow, External, or Network Disks
Applies To:
- Potentially all issues
Description: Media Center generally does not care where the media files it uses are stored on disk (whether internal, external, network, or any other volume you can mount in your OS). However, there are a few things to consider, especially if you are using a "slow" disk, such as a network or external disk.
Guides:
Check Your Disks and OS For Trouble
Applies To:
- Potentially all issues
Description:
There are a few different types of disk-access problems that can cause trouble in Media Center. I'll address Filesystem Corruption, Disk Permissions Issues, Malware, and OS Corruption here. If you are having lots of otherwise-unexplained trouble, this is absolutely worth checking.
Guides:
Background Tools (Thumbnail Building and Auto-Import)
Applies To:
- Hanging
- General performance sluggishness
Description:
Media Center does some activities in the background. These are typically tuned to have a minimal performance during use, but in some cases (particularly with older hardware), the background processes can have a noticeable impact on foreground behavior in MC. Things to check are:
You can check to see what MC is currently doing in the background via the Reporter function under Services & Plugins > Reporter.
Compatibility Mode Problems
Applies To:
- Error message when launching Media Center about it being installed for the wrong operating system.
Description: If Media Center was installed using one of the built-in Windows compatibility mode options, you will receive this error when you try to launch MC normally. MC does not require additional compatibility mode options under any supported version of Windows (including up to Windows 8.1 at the time of this writing).
Guides:
Gatekeeper Error Opening Media Center on Mac OSX
Applies To:
- Failure to open Media Center for Mac on OSX 10.8 or newer.
Guides: