Troubleshooting Drivers

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further information: Troubleshooting Guide

If Media Center is crashing completely, or especially if you are experiencing Blue-Screen system crashes, your Hardware Devices are the most likely culprit. Make sure you have up-to-date drivers. This typically means getting the drivers from the original manufacturer of your device, not from Microsoft's Windows Update (the built-in "update my driver" functionality), or from the original manufacturer of your computer. The exception to this is with some laptops, where the vendors don't always implement devices "nicely" and you must use their custom drivers (though this has been becoming less and less common). In these cases, ensure you have the most up to date (or otherwise known to be well-behaved) version available.

Applies To:

  • Crashing
  • Hanging
  • Performance problems
  • High CPU utilization
  • Audio Playback Issues
  • Video Playback Issues
  • Performance problems with Theater View

The most important drivers are:

Audio Devices

If it happens when you play something, and that file has audio, it could be a broken or misbehaving Audio device driver.

Some common (US/English) download locations for these are:

If you have a more esoteric external DAC, then check with the manufacturer of your audio device. If you are using HDMI-out from your video card, then the drivers are typically included with the drivers for your Video Card (see the next item).

Note: Mac OSX includes the audio drivers for all built-in audio hardware, though any third-party audio devices will require a driver from the manufacturer.

Video Cards (GPUs)

Impacts all video playback and Theater View, primarily. It can also cause problems with audio-only playback, particularly if a visualizer is visible on screen. Video card driver issues are a common source of Blue Screen crashes.

Here are some more common download links for GPU vendors:

Even in some of these latter cases where you have a laptop that has been abandoned by the manufacturer, and has bad driver bugs, you can sometimes get it working with helpful third-party driver "mods". This is a bit sketchy but can come through in a pinch. It would probably be a good idea to ask if you think you might need to do something like this.

If you aren't sure what kind of GPU you have, you can use GPU-Z from TechPowerUp to identify it.

Note: Mac OSX includes all the required (and only available) GPU drivers, so this does not apply to OSX at all.

Multimedia Frameworks

While not drivers particularly, MC does make extensive use of the multimedia frameworks on each supported OS. In particular, this includes DirectX on Windows and CoreAudio on OSX.

Microsoft provides a diagnostics tool for DirectX called dxdiag that can help you troubleshoot video and sound related hardware problems, and test the functionality of the framework.

Mac OSX doesn't have a direct corollary for dxdiag, though it can also be useful to check for problems in the appropriate section of the System Information applet. This can be accessed from within the About this Mac dialog found under the Apple menu. Tip: If you hold Option when you click the Apple menu, you can bypass the pretty (but typically not very informative) About this Mac dialog entirely and go straight to the full System Information app.

Platform Drivers

If you have more general performance issues, or crashes, you may also have a problem with your computer's "motherboard" drivers. These include the drivers for the various chips on your motherboard. If you have a modern CPU, you can obtain these directly from Intel or AMD:

Note: Likewise, Mac OSX includes all the required (and only available) chipset and platform drivers, so this does not apply to OSX at all.

Storage Drivers

If you are using a Network Attached Storage device of some kind, you may also want to check to see if the device itself has a firmware or software update:

Network Drivers

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