Well, two days to go and I may not be able to do this.
Due to trashing my computer and having to wait a week to get a new processor, I lost some time for testing.
The ATI TV Wonder just won't output sound when using VirtualDub. It works fine in the ATI software, and since ATI's web site is totally anal about this card requiring special software which you can't download for Win9x, I think they've hacked their drivers so that it will only work with their software.
I've still got the WinTV+FM card, but I'm not keen on using it, but it looks like I'll have to. It worked okay as far as the output, but the video controls left much to be desired. The video window could not be made full screen; I could maximize or make full screen the application window, but the actual video display would not go more than 640x480, so there was a big black border around it.
The video output I thought was just slightly inferior to the TV Wonder. However they both use the same chipset and it looks like a very similar tuner (in fact I had to un-install the TV Wonder in Device Manager, rather than just swapping the two cards, because Win98 would detect the WinTV as the TV Wonder with the same chipset).
The big problem though was that the WinTV created some horrible static whenever my CDROM was reading data. Not playing audio or anything, just whenever data was being transferred (though I didn't test audio). The CDROM wasn't connected to the card via the internal cable, the audio output of the card was connected to the line-in port on the sound card.
The WinTV was also hard to fit into the PCI slot for some reason, and is about twice the size of the TV Wonder. I think the CDROM audio problem may have been due to it being so close to the SCSI card, the tuner part of the WinTV was directly beneath the edge of the SCSI card where the plug is. Perhaps the tuner was causing interference.
Tonight I'm going to try hooking the internal audio cables to the TV Wonder and see if it works that way with VirtualDub, and then possibly try another PCI slot. If nothing works, then I'll try the WinTV again and see if I can avoid the sound problem.
For hard drives though, I knew I needed lots of space and some speed. So I got two 30GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40's (ATA/100), and have them on the KT7-RAID's Highpoint controller. HDTach indicates the read speed is about 50% higher than my single IBM drive on average, with some parts at twice as fast. The burst read speed is apparently more than HDTach is able to measure, because it's always maxed out on the 80MBps scale, the scale doesn't seem to go higher.
Due to trashing my computer and having to wait a week to get a new processor, I lost some time for testing.
The ATI TV Wonder just won't output sound when using VirtualDub. It works fine in the ATI software, and since ATI's web site is totally anal about this card requiring special software which you can't download for Win9x, I think they've hacked their drivers so that it will only work with their software.
I've still got the WinTV+FM card, but I'm not keen on using it, but it looks like I'll have to. It worked okay as far as the output, but the video controls left much to be desired. The video window could not be made full screen; I could maximize or make full screen the application window, but the actual video display would not go more than 640x480, so there was a big black border around it.
The video output I thought was just slightly inferior to the TV Wonder. However they both use the same chipset and it looks like a very similar tuner (in fact I had to un-install the TV Wonder in Device Manager, rather than just swapping the two cards, because Win98 would detect the WinTV as the TV Wonder with the same chipset).
The big problem though was that the WinTV created some horrible static whenever my CDROM was reading data. Not playing audio or anything, just whenever data was being transferred (though I didn't test audio). The CDROM wasn't connected to the card via the internal cable, the audio output of the card was connected to the line-in port on the sound card.
The WinTV was also hard to fit into the PCI slot for some reason, and is about twice the size of the TV Wonder. I think the CDROM audio problem may have been due to it being so close to the SCSI card, the tuner part of the WinTV was directly beneath the edge of the SCSI card where the plug is. Perhaps the tuner was causing interference.
Tonight I'm going to try hooking the internal audio cables to the TV Wonder and see if it works that way with VirtualDub, and then possibly try another PCI slot. If nothing works, then I'll try the WinTV again and see if I can avoid the sound problem.
For hard drives though, I knew I needed lots of space and some speed. So I got two 30GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40's (ATA/100), and have them on the KT7-RAID's Highpoint controller. HDTach indicates the read speed is about 50% higher than my single IBM drive on average, with some parts at twice as fast. The burst read speed is apparently more than HDTach is able to measure, because it's always maxed out on the 80MBps scale, the scale doesn't seem to go higher.
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