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TV "wonder" VE issues

P

Pink0

Senior member
Hey everyone!
This is my first ATI product and I must say that it has left a very bad taste in my mouth. I would have returned it by now but I seem to have misplaced my reciept so I'll appreciate any help you could give me. I have installed the TV "wonder" VE in my system several times. I have used the 7.1s which worked okay as long as I help the shift key while opening or using the fix that someone on rage3d made. However, my system became unstable after installing this. Prime95 would not pass the torture test and at least 2 times an hour explorer would crash and re-launch. Sometimes the system would hard lock.
I have installed the 7.6betas and they work without the need to hold shift. Its picture quality is better but still not as good as Dscaler or the hauppauge. I'm still experiencing the same stability issues.
Thinking that my install of windows might be hosed I reformatted my software partition and reinstalled. Same thing with either set of drivers. I have tried different PCI slots too.
I can't get this poorly supported thing to idle stable in my system let alone capture stable. Msconfig and the Run key is clear. There are no programs loading in the background. I believe it to be a driver issue. The guys at Rage3d don't have an answer for me but I'm hoping that you guys might. I'd really appreciate it!
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
System specs:
Athlon XP 1700+ AG0IA
256MBPC2100cas2.5x2 (512MB total)
MSI K7T266 Pro2-RU (with USB 2.0 and RAID) Raid disabled. All legacy port disabled.
Visiontek GeForce 3 Ti200 W/TV out
ATI TV "wonder" VE
Linksys Etherfast 10/100 NIC
Realtek RTL8139 10/100 NIC
LG 12x8x32 Burner
80GB Maxtor 7200RPM
Panasonic Floppy
Creative Soundblaster Audigy Platinum
IBM E94 19" monitor
Epson C40UX printer
Canon D646U scanner
Samsung Digital Camera
Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro
Microsoft Intellimouse optical USB
Windows XP Pro SP1 with all updates
 
The first thing I would do is take the card out and uninstall the drivers. See if the system is still unstable. If it is then you probably need to reinstall windows. In my case for some reason MMC 7.1 worked better than any of the others I tried. I also remember that UPDATING my video driver CAUSED problems (funny thing is it was an ATI video card). I suggest you also try different drivers for both it and your video card. I hope this helps.
 
Thanks for your response. As stated above I have already reinstalled windows. The problem goes away as soon as the card and drivers are stripped from the system.
 
BTW I find that the 7.1 drivers cause far less crashes than the 7.6 drivers and that prime95 lasts almost twice as long with these drivers. But the image quality is garbage and any instability is of course unacceptable.
 
What happens if you have the card in but do NOT install the driver? This should help you determine if it is driver related or if it has something to do with the card itself. If it does it without the drivers installed then you may have a defective card.
 
Good idea. After I formatted my software partition and reinstalled windows I reinstalled the drivers and software for all of my other apps and made sure that they system was working 100%. The card was physically installed by not the drivers. I ran prime 95 all night with no errors and no errors in usage. I suppose that means that the card being physically installed isn't causing the problem but rather the drivers...
 
I can't comment on if the actual board itself is causing any issues but if it's the drivers there are some alternatives:

Drivers for any card with Brooktree chip (ATi TV Wonder VE being one of them) 🙂

These are excellent drivers and even fix the odd bug with capturing in high resoloutions. I use them exclusively. These won't work with the ATi software but there is higher quality software out there anyway so that's not even an issue.

I would switch to these.

EDIT :sp
 
Thanks buddy! I'm going to give these a try today. Unfortunately after installing the drivers the only way to make the system stable again is a format. I'm going to do that now. I'll keep you posted. I like to use Ulead to capture since the ATI software's image quality is crap but ATI's drivers are so screwed I haven't been able to. Hopefully this will let me. Thanks!
 
Yes, even if your system wan't crashing I would still recommend these because ATi's drivers (at least in their software and VirtualDub) will not let you capture in anything above 480 x 320 or something close to that. And that's very odd because it uses the darn Brooktree chip.

Using these drivers will allow you to capture with ease at resoloutions xxx x 480 or whatever you like, with any software you choose(including Ulead and Virtualdub, just not ATi's).

Good luck to you
 
Yeah, ATI's 7.6 won't let you record past 640x240 and the setting for "dvd" is 352x240!!!!!! I guess ATI just sucks at writing drivers. I'm going to use D Scaler for watching TV since it has great de-interlacing features and looks far superior to ATI's software. I'm going to use Ulead for recording. Do you have any suggestions for a program to use as a digital VCR? You know, where I can program the time to start capture and end capture? I'd appreciate it.
 
ATi writes good video card drivers but I just can't understand how they can pawn off such terrible TV wonder drivers.

Anywho, I've played around with Showshifter a bit and it seems to do what you like with good results.
 
I've had similar problems with my ATI All in Wonder, so I guess its the TV tuner drivers thats one cause. For me, my only complaint is that Explorer re-launches often. When that happens, I cant access the programs that are minimized to the system tray because everything except for the clock is cleared out. Hopefully ATI will put out new drivers soon for the TV tuner.

I would use other software if it werent for the fact that the ATI remote control only works with ATI software. They've added the ability for the user to customize the programs it works with, but I havent given it a try yet.
 
Yes. Explorer crashes and relaunches all the time. I'm just downloading the windows update on the machine with it now. We'll see how these new drivers not form ATI work out. I doubt you're going to see any new drivers from ATI for a while. It took them a year between 7.1 and 7.6 for this card and it's still in beta so 1 year and 2 months and counting....very crappy product support.
 
Sorry, just re-read your post. You have an all in wonder? Wow, ATI drivers = crap. I thought it was limited to just the tuner. I'll never even look at another ATI product again. I don't care how fast it is.
 
4 hours after the tip came in....it works! The drivers that gregor7777 linked to are great. Prime 95 has been running for over an hour now and it previously wouldn't last 20 minutes. No explorer crashes so far, no reboots, and no hard locks. Aditionally, ulead can now capture with the touch of a button rather than having to deal with half a dozen error messages about some setting or another not being supported. Oh, and I can now capture over 320x240. YAY! Thanks for the tip man!
 
Originally posted by: gregor7777
ATi writes good video card drivers but I just can't understand how they can pawn off such terrible TV wonder drivers.

Anywho, I've played around with Showshifter a bit and it seems to do what you like with good results.
Click to expand...
What's with the Kindergarden-level interface on ShowShifter? Is the application really supposed to look like this?
 
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