DVD Support With Latest Radeon Drivers

[DallasTejas]

I bought a new Voodoo5 5500 2 days before the nVidia buyout. Got scared about future driver support so I returned it and bought a Radeon 64 DDR VIVO. I've always been a 3dfx fan, so the news was really sad.

Anyway, I made the mistake of installing the Radeon with the included CDROM. Big mistake!. The multimedia center software caused a protection error (blue screen) on bootup with WinME. Could not cleanly delete it. Wound up reformatting and re-installing WinME. Downloaded the latest ME drivers from ATI and everything is stable.

On the ATI driver page, they list the WME_W98_RADEON_4_12_3056 drivers as having DVD support. That is the only part of the Multimedia Center that I care about anyway. When I installed the drivers from the ATI\support\WME_W98_RADEON_4_12_3056 directory, I did not see any DVD software.
There is another directory (ATI\GART) from the driver install that has an ATIGART.exe in it. Is this the DVD software?

Has anyone used this driver build under WinME and sucessfully got the DVD software working? I'd appreciate a little help.

 

[Comp10]

I don't use WinME so I can't help you with that part of your problem, but the only way to get the ATI DVD player is to install it off the installation disk (don't have to install the drivers too, just select the custom installation option when given the option, and only install the DVD player portion of the muiltimedia center). The driver updates you can download only contain the video drivers, not the DVD player.

 

[DallasTejas]

Comp10,

Thanks for the input but I think the problem lies in the Multimedia Applications on the CDROM. Actually, after reformatting and re-installing WinME, I installed the latest drivers (only) and everything came up fine. I then tried a custom install off of the CDROM and deselected the drivers and DirectX (already installed 8.0). When the update was applied and did the reboot, I blue-screened with the protection error again. Had re-install WinME again (long night!!).

I could turn off everything but the DVD player, but I'm feeling a bit snakebit with this version on the CD. There was a flyer with the card documentation stating that the drivers had not been tested with ME and that you should download the latest version off the web.

I feel sure that there is some way to get the DVD software running from the updated drivers. If you look at their URL at http://support.ati.com/products/pc/radeon/radeon_drivers.html they state that they provide the DVD software and multimedia center. Unfortuneately, ATI chose not to provide any type of readme file with the software.

Has anyone used them with sucess?

 

[syf3r]

just a side point to make here... why not ghost your machine after you install it and before you test drivers, so instead of taking hours to reinstall the machine, you spend 10 minutes restoring the ghost image... just a thought...

-syf3r.

 

[DallasTejas]

Good idea. I guess the only thing that saved me was that this is a brand new setup I built. Didn't have a lot of software and important data on it yet.

I'm assuming that the system save/restore built into WinME should be a good way to ghost. I have Norton SystemWorks 2001, but it didn't come with Ghost. I think you have to get the Pro version or something.

 

[DallasTejas]

My problem was not with WinME but with the VIA KT133 chipset. I did not need to reformat and reinstall WinME after all.

The answer was right here on the AnandTech website:

The first problem with the Radeon's drivers on VIA-based systems is that the install program actually replaces any version of the VIA GART found on the system with version 3.30, which is packaged with the drivers. Although this may end up helping some with older GART drivers, it will hurt power users in the long term as the install program replaces any GART driver on the system with the packaged version, even if the drivers on the system are newer than those in the video card install program. For example, in our Athlon KX133 test system, the older GART version actually prevented us from getting into Windows, forcing us to boot in safe mode to restore the new GART drivers. The newest version of GART, version 4.03, is available from VIA's website.

This flaw will result in decreased card performance, as the older GART versions almost never have the same speed as the new ones. In addition, some systems may even be inoperable with the older GART drivers, forcing the user to boot in safe mode to replace ATI's GART driver with the previous one. Luckily, these problems only arise under the normal install. The custom install option does bring up a check box for "upgrading" the GART drivers which can be unchecked. We highly suggest that everyone with a VIA chipset in their system uncheck this option and gets the newest GART version from VIA's website:

http://www.viatech.com/drivers/index.htm

For the whole article go to: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1281&p=9