Re: Black Screen after turning TV off, then back on
Interesting… I tried that tool on my dual-monitor dev machine. Several times, I was able to get my main monitor (Dell U2410, DVI to DVI on ATI 5670) to stay black. The secondary monitor (Dell 1901FP, VGA to VGA on same ATI 5670) always came back up. For grins, I ran MonInfo on the secondary, so I could use it to see the EDID data when the main monitor was blank.
Interestingly, the EDID data for the blacked-out monitor was fine. All same as when the display wasn’t blank.
I have a couple of take-aways with this tool and/or this “black screen” problem:
– The “black screen” happens with diverse hardware. HTPC is Core i3 integrated Intel HD graphics to AVR to TV. My dev machine is ATI 5670 dual monitor DVI/VGA.
– Maybe it is HDCP related… My 1901FP is not HDCP aware (too old), where-as my U2410 is HDCP compliant.
– Still very intermittent. I had to try quite a few times to make the problem happen. I assigned hdmiOn.exe to a keyboard shortcut, just so I could run it quicky.
– It seems that since “black screen” happens with my dev machine using hdmiOn.exe to turn the displays off/then on again, I think it is likely it would not fix the problem I’m seeing at the HTPC.
– This seems more and more like some sort of Windows bug. Maybe it has been there a long time — there are reports of exactly the same bug happening as far back as XP Media Center.
– Even if hdmiOn.exe could help me, I was hard-pressed to find an event in Task Scheduler I could use to trigger it. Perhaps a custom app could monitor for changes in display status and trigger an event which would trigger the app.
More experimentation to come… when I have the time…