Help with installing my ATI card in a different computer

[dfisher]

I had a lower power computer (1GB Celeron) that I was using for converting vhs & beta tapes to dvd using an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500DV. It actually did a very good job. I decided to upgrade to something with a little more power so I bought a used Dell Optiplex GX240 with a Pentium4 1.6gb on ebay. I transfered my ram sticks so I had 512 megs. Put in my harddrives (maxtor 30gb & 80gb), installed my Windows 2000, installed the ATI card, did all the upgrades & everything was working fine. Then I went & tried to make a recording from TV. Everything seemed fine. All of the settings were exactly the same as when I had everything installed in the old computer. When I played the recording back, NO VIDEO. I had sound, but no video. I uninstalled all of the ATI stuff & started from scratch. Still no go. I was installing Multimedia 7.7. I also have 8.8 & tried that. Same thing. One thing I did notice was that it did not want to install WDM from the disk. I had to download that separatly from ATI & install it. But I still have the problem. Everything seems to be working, but it will not play the video. I'm not sure if it's not recording the video portion (which is what I suspect), or if it's in the playback. Any suggestions would be greatly appreceated.

[dfisher052]

Never mind. I found the problem. I hadn't installed my Power DVD program yet. I just installed it & that solved the problem. I would have thought that the media player that installs with the Multimedia program that comes with the ATI board would have played the video file, but I guess not. Now I notice a lip sync problem, but I guess that should clear up with a sound card, instead of using the on board sound. It better. I must say that I did NOT have a lip sync problem using the on board sound with my older low power computer. So much for progress.

[dfisher052]

Well, if it's not one thing, than it's another. It seems that loading Power DVD solved one problem, but there still is another problem. On playback the lower half of the picture is a transparent lime green color. The setup is as follows:
Digital VCR - MPEG-2. I have it setup with custom settings. 352x480, 48,000 khz, 16 bit stereo, no inverse 3:2 pulldown, no deinterlacing, no visual masking, no capture cropped video, constant bit rate set at 3.48 M Bit/second & motion estimation quality at 90. Now I can't believe these settings are too much for this computer. As I mentioned earlier all of these same identical settings worked great with a computer with a celeron 1gb. Now it has problems with a computer with a pentium4 1.6gb. What's happening here?

[dfisher052]

Well, I finally solved the problem myself. After trying just about every concievable combination I changed the constant bit rate to variable and that did it. It now works. Now, who would have thought that someting as simple as that would be the solution & why it wouldn't work with constant. Go figure.

[edDV]

The ATI AIW cards can be quirky and different vintage drivers seem to create different quirks.

FWIW: I have a pair of AIW 8500DVs here and can offer the following observations. My machines are P4 and Celeron, both Northwood 2.4 GHZ. The MMC versions that seemed most stable to me turned out to be 8.7 and 9.02. Once I get MMC stable, I tend to sit on a version unless something else goes wrong. Both are now using 9.02.

The DVD player (MPeg2 decoder) isn't supplied with the download MMC. You need to first install the one from your original CD and that may not still work with 9.02 MMC. So it is a good idea to use PowerDVD or WinDVD to install the MPeg2 decoder. I have PowerDVD v4 on one machine and v6 on the other and both seem to work fine. The ATI DVD player upgrade requires buying a new CD update ($20 inc;. shipping) but IMO the ATI DVD player is far inferior to PowerDVD or WinDVD.

Also, I avoid use of the ATI VCR format since it can only be played by the ATI player (unless each file is converted to MPeg2 in library). I think all of your custom settings can be replicated with straight MPeg2 encoding and the resulting file can be played in any of the players and directly authored to DVD.

As far as features, the AIW 8500DV seems very close to the AIW 9600.

[lordsmurf]

edDV just gave solid advice. Couldn't have said it better myself.