ATI TV Wonder VE - how to get it up to snuff?

[tomreedtoon]

Okay, guys. The basics: I'm running said TV Wonder VE on a 1 Ghz Athlon system with 512 megs of 266 DDR RAM, and a no-name graphics card (Savage 2000 64 meg w/video out) with Windows 98 SE. I've used the MMC 7.1, done Stinky's tweaks, and modeler_us's tricks with WinVCR. It hasn't been satisfactory, but I'd like some advice on these points.

1) If I upgrade to Windows XP Pro, is there any real benefit besides the removal of limits on hard drive capture? Or will I end up losing all the software I bought because it's incompatable?

2) The BTWIN-whatever drivers on http://www.sourceforge.net won't load in Win 98 SE. The install program's suggestion about "manually loading the drivers" doesn't work. Do these drivers work and install much, much better on XP?

3) More specifically, has anyone with the TV Wonder VE and Win XP had any troubles installing the BTWIN drivers, or getting them to work? Is it necessary to uninstall everything from ATI's software (MMC and their drivers) before installing BTWIN, or is it required to keep those drivers on to install BTWIN? (This last point is questionable; I've heard it both ways.)

4) For those who have tried the supposed "beta test" MMC 7.6 for the TV Wonder VE card, available on ATI's web site, what's the big difference? Do their "new" drivers allow 480x480 NTSC captures for Super Video CD, or is it just the same old limit?

5) Would I get better results with some other capture program and the BTWIN drivers from Sourceforge (and if so, what capture programs do you suggest?) Much as I like Modeler's one-step stuff, I think I could put a complete hour program on one SVCD if I used two-pass VBR encoding, and if so, I'm willing to let the encoding program work while I sleep.

Answers to these questions would help a lot. It would also help a lot if everybody contributed a few bucks to the site; maybe the "capture card" section would come back to life and answer these questions without clogging up the forums. Thanks in advance for your help.

[tomreedtoon]

Well, since no one answered the question, let me explain what I did. It may help someone else.

I installed Win XP Pro on my machine. Remarkably, almost everything left on the hard drive was still there. I installed the new version of ATI's drivers and their updated MMC. Not very satisfactory results.

So, I installed the BTWIN drivers from Sourceforge. Unlike under Win 98, they installed beautifully under Win XP. I found I could make amazing looking captures at true 480 x 480 resolution, using either VirtualDub or FreeVCR.

One glitch I had to overcome was that, unlike every previous edition of Windows, you mute channels in the Volume Control panel by checking the box. It works the other way in 95 and 98.

There are only two problems left; discovering why the audio seems to "warble" (change volume drastically while playing) and getting another hard drive so I have the space to capture things.

[OptimusPrime22]

I'm glad somebody decided to post this topic because that is the cap card that I have now. I'm getting a copy of XP soon and a new hard drive so I can do lots of raw AVI caps to encode through TMPEG. So did you have to install any different drivers on XP to get the card to work with V-dub?

[tomreedtoon]

I haven't tried VirtualDub. I was told it used a "VFW" driver, while the drivers for most of the other capture and editing programs use WDM drivers. The ones from http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/ are what I use, since they are apparently the only way to get the horizontal resolution up to 400 lines. (The original ATI drivers don't.)

I've also heard that some year they may rewrite VirtualDub to use WDM drivers, but no one knows when.