Silent Stream BugFix

The Silent Stream bug has affected HDMI receivers for a long time, and no reliable solution has been offered by either Nvidia or AMD. Essentially, it causes receivers to miss the first few seconds of audio, or even not play short sounds entirely, due to becoming inactive after an extended silence.

HDMI is quickly becoming the preferred method of connecting monitors and TVs to computers, as it carries both audio and video, unlike DVI. However, not all receivers are optimized for this type of connection, and they can be slow to wake when audio is played after a prolonged lack of signal.

If this issue affects your HDMI receiver, it may miss the first few seconds of audio when you start playing something, and 1-2 second sounds may be skipped entirely. To fix this issue, one solution is to play a continuous stream of silence, preventing the receiver from ever “switching off”.

Silent Stream BugFix is a small tray application that runs in the background and generates a silent audio stream. You can see it in the Windows volume mixer, but it is never noticeable otherwise. If the program has stopped working, you can reload it by right-clicking the tray icon. It can also be loaded at system startup automatically.