New aiw's with theater 550 chips

[aiw9800proman]

Hi all,

After my last post about a very old aiw card im now back with a post about the new ones with the 550 chips. My question relates solely to capturing analogue vhs tapes via svideo and composite and im basically looking for opinions on capture quality to dv avi and cropped mpeg.

Any info would be great as im considering getting one.

Mick

[aiw9800proman]

The Tv wonder elite has really caught my attention
It does not appear to be available in the u.k. which makes me think that all the new filters and video cleaning are ntsc only ?

Im not the slightest bit interested in the tuner or tv but am interested in using it as a vhs capture card.

Am I barking up the wrong tree with this ?

Mick

[nutty88]

You'll be happy to hear that the theatre 550 are available in the UK. I got mine online. It's the Sapphire Theatrix. It's the exact same board as the TV Wonder Elite just been renamed. With support for ATI's Multimedia Center just around the corner. If you can get a hold of MMC 9.10 that comes with some of the newer AIW it works great with that. The only problem I have is hardware mpeg encoding. If I use 352x576 I get some sort of banding on the captures plus Multimedia Center's software mpeg capture looks much better in my opinion and give you greater control over the bitrate.

Another thing I've noticed is the Theatre 550 seems to be outputing a 720x576 picture to mmc. MMC then transcodes it to what ever mpeg settings you chose.

[aiw9800proman]

Hi Nutty,

Many thanks for the info, ive just found one for £50.00 but waiting on stock. Im surprised that the hardware mpeg doesnt seem to good as the aiw cards have provided some really good mpeg captures in the past.

What im really interested in is all the new 3d, 2d, dnr etc and am wondering if all of these video enhancements can be applied to an analogue feed from pal vhs.

The literature ive been reading makes a point about cleaning up tv signals for pc display but doesn't say much about using the new features for recording from analogue sources ?

Any info you have would be much appreciated.

Great to hear from someone in u.k.

Mick

[nutty88]

The only way I can change the settings for the filters is to use graphedit. I think the latest version of ChrisTV supports the 550 and can change the filter settings. I'm really happy with my card. To me VHS looks a lot sharper. the only problem with the card is Macrovision.

[mikiem]

FWIW as far as capture quality, when I looked at these almost a year ago the prevailing opinion seemed to be that the bundled software was pretty poor, but that could be overcome by upgrading to a better version of the Cyberlink prog. Otherwise performance was steller, but geared towards mpg2, and of course, no mmc.

[aiw9800proman]

I have now read a huge amount of reviews on this card and most of them tell a very unhappy story about the software, although this puts me off im still thinking its the highest quality video capture card currently available and also higher quality than any of the external devices available. If someone wants to point out a device with better hardware specs then please do so because im very interested.

The cyberlink and tv tuner software appears to be rubbish but I wouldnt have a use for them anyway, I would only want this card for analogue video capture from a vcr.

It does appear that the on-chip locked audio only captures in mono, does anyone know if thats a hardware or software limitation ? I cant believe ATI would design a locked audio chip that only catures in mono !

Finally, has anyone here managed to use this card with ati mmc and have full access to all the recording configurations that you would get with an aiw card ?

Cheers

Mick

[mikiem]

Wellllll.... that's sort of why I bought another aiw last spring. OTOH, newest X series aiw's are supposed to have both more & more advanced hardware video acceleration, but start at close to $300 US.

[SHS]

aiw9800proman don't get me wrong but it is very nice card and work well in SageTV and BeyondTV and few other and ATI is working hard on fixing min bugs grant it not close to being as useful as PVR 150 or 250 but it getting there.

[raindance]

One thing I've read about this card is that a PAL card can ONLY capture in PAL, even when using composite/s-video inputs. Almost all other cards are able to accept both PAL/NTSC inputs via composite/s-video.

This is the one reason why I've not bought this card yet... Guess I'll wait for other cards with a 3D comb filter to be released...