how shall an ATI Theater 550 owner find his way...

[greymalkin]

Alright..i was the owner of an ATI AIW 9000 for a few years and it did everything I needed it to. I decided it was time to upgrade and rather than go with another AIW I decided to split the duties between video card and capture card up so I could upgrade one without having to upgrade the other. I decided on the sapphire line of products..the radeon 9800 and the theater 550 capture card.

So my problem now is with the MMC. I had been using 9.03 with the AIW and with the 550 I got sound but no video. I heard this is common and to wait for 9.04. Well I went to ATI's site the other day and they already had 9.08! Well this is great I thought..so I went to downloading the 8,000 different installs necessary for MMC to work and the beloved TV option is n't even there to install! The only thing that installs is some EASYSHARE TV which just looks for an EASYSHARE server. I'm a bit confused as I'm now out of the familiar usage of my software. I also notice that when I go to device manager it doesn't show the Theater 550 hardware..rather some ATI WDM something or other driver then a legacy capture device. Is my problem that the 550 isn't being properly seen because I'm in the ATI video driver web or did TV just get gutted out of MMC? I used the ATI Uninstall Utility and re-installed all the latest drivers for the 9800 and the 550..as well as the (okay only 2) MMC setup files.

Just trying to get my MMC to work again basically.

thank yoo.

[farmkid]

After waiting several months for the theater 550 to come out, I was one of the first to buy one. I have been using it since some time in January and have been happy with it for the most part. The one issue I have is the one you bring up--that of MMC support. When the card first came out, MMC was on version 9.02 if I remember correctly. As you mentioned, the manual states that MMC 9.04 will support the card but 9.04 never appeared. Version 9.02 did not work, but when 9.03 came out, several people, myself included, found that it did indeed work, albeit with some wierd interlacing problems. MMC 9.06 then came out and ATI did something to completely disable theater 550 support. ATI execs then said that they never intended for MMC to support the 550 and it never will. You can read about it (and a whole lot more) over at hexus.net http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=29031 It is a pretty long thread but very informative. If you want to find the "official" stuff from ATI, find the posts by Andrzej. He is some high up dude in ATI, apparently.

I would recommend you try BeyondTV or GBPVR. GBPVR is free and people are generally happy with it. ATI will probably support the theater 550 in MMC at some point, but not any time soon. Look for it when you see them use the chip in the AIW cards.

Good luck.