HELP! ATI TV WONDER IF IT WORKS. HELP PLEASE!

[ATIWONDERIFWORKS]

I have an ati tv wonder and I cant get it to work. I first installed it with the cd it came with but got no sound. I then updated the drivers and installed MMC7.1, DX8, and DX8 video capture supplement. Now the card works in MMC with sound but virtual dub does not work. It says driver not found. If anyone got this card to work with virtualdub with sound please let me know what drivers, files you used. Also, when this card is properly intsalled what elements should be in the device manager. Thanks.

[vhelp]

ATIWONDERIFWORKS,

I think the step you took may have ben the error.
What you probabaly could have done was:
-> for RECording do <-
* right-click speaker icon in system tray
* click adjust Audio properties
* (under the Record area) click the little vol/mic icon
--- will see a mixer graph with some settings. click the [x] Select for YOUR
audio card, per your source, ie, if it's set to Line-In, then check this. Sound
may record in your capture.
.
.
or, -> for VOLume do <-
* double-click speaker icon in system tray
* there, you can adjust the different Audio sliders, ie, Line-In or Aux, etc.
Hopefully, you should begin hearing sound. But, you may want to look
into the above for the RECording sound capture - do some tests.

Later!

[ATIWONDERIFWORKS]

Thanks, but no luck using original CD drivers. Double-checked it all and it looked good. If i use external line option i should be able to plug in headphones to the out of the ati card, correct? I did and hear nothing.Tried internal connection also. If i now install MMC7.1 the sound will work but virtualdub wont.

[Torontonian]

I have ATI TV Wonder - it works perfect to me (Win2000).

I installed latest MMC 7.1 from ATI's web site, not from CD.

VDub has no problem to capture form this card, but it limits me to get only half-frame (240 lines).
DS applications (iuVCR, AMcap) work perfect & I can capture at 720x480.

So, question: what OS are you using? If win2000 - did you install servicepack 2? Because I suspect you don't have Vfwwdm.dll in your winnt\system32 -- VDub needs it under w2k.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Torontonian on 2001-11-30 09:16:04 ]</font>

[ATIWONDERIFWORKS]

Thanks, but I am using windows98. does win98 require this file "Vfwwdm.dll". Where should it be?

[Torontonian]

That's another issue.

Vdub uses VFW interface and needs VFW drivers. As far as I know ATI supplies their products only with WDM drivers. Win98 can handle both (win200 has only WDM). But you don't have VFW drivers installed, only WDM (thanks to ATI), so VDub just doesn't see your card at all.
So, in w2000 it's solved by using VFW-to-WDM mapper (which is that dll I mentioned above). But I'm not sure whether such mapper exists for win98, probably doesn't.

Thus, you have not many choices:
1) force ATI to write VFW drivers (dead way)
2) use only WDM-based applications (ATI MMC, iuVCR, FlyDS, AMcap)
3) find VFW drivers for other bt878-based cards & try to make them work for ATI (by checking one by one with maybe little changes in bt848.inf file).
4) find out whether vfw-to-wdm mapper exists for win98

[vcdman24]

Toronto,

You wrote "VDub has no problem to capture form this card, but it limits me to get only half-frame (240 lines).
DS applications (iuVCR, AMcap) work perfect & I can capture at 720x480."

I have been trying for ever to capture at X480 instead of X240. What are the applications isVCR and AMcap?

Do they need any special drivers etc?

I am useing win98se if that matters.

Thanks

[ATIWONDERIFWORKS]

( BTW the headphone trick works to check the audio )
I got MMC7.1 to work again but virtualdub still is not functioning. If Virtual dub does not work with wdm drivers how come it works with MMC6.3? The card works without sound in MMC6.3.
In the system device manager these are my devices:

Under MMC7.1
-ATI TV Wonder BtCap, WDM Audio Capture
-ATI TV Wonder BtCap, WDM Video Capture
-ATI TV Wonder Tv tuner, Phillips WDM TvTuner
-ATI TV Wonder WDM Audio Crossbar
-ATI TV Wonder WDM Video Crossbar
-ATI TV Wonder WDM teletext decoder
-Specialized PCD WDM VBL Codec

Does this look right?
If someone managed to get virtualdub working do any of these get changed?

Under MMC6.3
All I remember being there is :
-ATI TV Wonder Bt878 Video Capture
-ATI TV Wonder Bt878 Audio Capture

Do these use VFW drivers?

[Torontonian]

vcdman24, you're using win98 - that's the point. Try to run VDub under win2000 and you will have all the joy with it.

ATIWONDERIFWORKS, it looks to me that MMC 6 installs VFW drivers, at least it's very much alike.
So, try MMC 6. Do you hear sound in MMC 6? If Vdub doesn't turn sound on, try to run MMC first then quickly exit from it & run VDub immidiatelly - sometimes it works (I do the same thing when I need sound under W2000 in VDub), but not always. If it doesn't work, try other things (which I have no idea about).

[vhelp]

ATIWONDERIFWORKS,

Again, I'd look into my previous post. Sounds like you didn't bother
to give it a try. Oh, well.

Another thought comes to mind... Get another sound card. Just because
it works in someone else's, doesn't mean it'll work in
yours - - But, then again, same applies, but in
reverse - -

Not withstanding. . . Sounds like YOU NEED TO DO A COMPLETE
REinstallation of your video drivers - ALL!!

Don't feel too bad. I had to it also - today!! My
problem wasn't sound, but rather, it was not SEEing any video on my monitor!

It sounds like you've ben installing and reinstalling drivers of all kinds - one
too many times. Me too!! The ONLY way to rid yourself
of this trouble is to wipe EVERY sign of your ATI
drivers and do a complete video driver installation (use your cd, not a copy on your hard drive, as I have done) Sometimes, it wil only work if you use the cd for the installation. I use the cd only when I'm completely exhausted with the instal/reinstall of divers and nothings
works.

STEP 1:
---------
How to wipe?
A - first, go into Device Mgr and dbl-click "Display adapters"
B - dbl-click your Video card (mine is ATI Rage Fury)
C - click the "Driver" tab
D - and click "Driver Update" button, then "Next", then,
E - now choose the "(o) Display a list..."
F - now, a dialog might pop up "...building driver info. database. . ."
G - now, choose the "(o) Show all hardware", then
H - then, under "Manufacturers", scroll all the way to the top and
---- select "(Standard display types)", and click the "Standard Display Adapter (VGA)"
---- continue following and then
Now, delete ALL your video drivers and capture card
drivers from your system. Then do I.
I - resstart you pc.

Now, dependard on your system configuration (everyone act
differently) when windows starts sensing your video card,
(depending on your video cards driver installation requirements) just click the "cancel" button and let
windows finish booting up. Once windows finishes botting
up and the HD lite stops, proceed to install
your video card driver.

Once your video driver is properly installed, and you
are SURE it is, IMO (and I practice this all the time)
I would backup my USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT files, so that
in the event that somethings happens, you can just copy
those two files back into your windows directory and start
again, but this time, without re-installing your video
drivers! This saves me a lot of time!

STEP 2:
--------
Now, proceed to install your Video Capture drivers (if
you have any to install) If you don't have any, I'd
suggest you FIND one. A VFW driver that is. I have so
many of them on my hard drive. The one I used was one
for the Hauppage WinTV card. No, I don't have the wintv
in my pc. But, if installed flawlessly, and my capture
abilities worked the first time in avi_io and Virtualdub.
And, I can get 352x480 captures! I'm not too picky about capping higher because it'll only require much more hard drive space. I have a 30g HD and I can cap a 2 mabe a
2 1/2 hour movie at 352x480 with Huffy codec.
I can also push the envelop a little further... buy using
Virtualdub, and cap at 352x480 and use ONE filter - the
deintelace (blend) filter. It pushes my cpu to 95%-100%
and drop maybe a 100 fames every 10 minutes, but after
I encoded to SVCD, there were not defects and NO audio synch. Which leads me to another issue - your AUDIO.
I know you don't want to listen to me, and most if not,
ALL don't, but assuming you are using your SB Live
card. . . It's a CPU resource and PCI bandit!! Need I
say more!

AUDIO:
Yanking out your SB Live card CAN, in some cases give you
an extra 5% - 10% more CPU% or PCI bandwith. For me,
after swaping out my SB Live 5.1, for a Santa Cruz, I saw
an increase in my video capture performance. Ask yourself,
DO I REALLY NEED MY SB LIVE??? I answered, YES LOL, but,
I needed better video captures, so I did what I had to
do and swapped, as a test to see if it would help me.
And, YES, it did. I still have the card, but I don't
miss it any more. Can always use it for a furture PC
upgrade.
I have a $19 audio card I got a while ago. Neve opend the
box, but am eger to try it and see if I get any, even
better performance in my captures. And, if this works,
I WILL KEEP this card in my system, and produce better SVCDs.

Much more ta give you, but you don't really want it. So,
I'll stop here.

Just wanted to mention this:
The video drivers I use were the onces that came on the cd for:
* ATI Rage Fury
* ATI-TV Wonder
* VFW drivers from Hauppge wintv cards
I didn't use ANY driver updates - all were origonals.

I have a zillion more other experimnets to perform, but
they can wait till tomorrow. I captured the Wizard of Oz,
but ran out of HD space, due to other large AVI files I
needed to finish encoding.

I think the above steps shoud work for you, give or take
a little. ...it's kind of late right now. See what you
can do with the above steps. So, the above shoud keep
you busy.


---------------------------------------------
Sample Clips . . .revised web site

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: vhelp on 2001-12-01 23:48:13 ]</font>

[ATIWONDERIFWORKS]

Actually I did look into it but was sure as I could be that that wasnt the problem. Also I did wipe out all the drivers and clean out the registry. Then I reinstalled the WDM drivers and MMC7.1. I tested it and crashed after about 2 hours on a good quality setting. I looked into some other programs and installed iuVCR. It seems to work good. I did some short captures but I havent had the chance to fully test it yet. It seems to give alot of options for codecs and such. Thanks for the help and I am going to be doing my own experimenting.

On the sound thing, I used to have a SB LIVE 5.1 but I was able to unload it on ebay for what I paid for it. I just didnt think it was worth the extra money. Glad to hear I dont really need it.

Now I am wondering if I should upgrade my operating system.

[todd-alaska]

I have the tv wonder ve with a soundlaster sound sound card, win xp pro

any ideas why i can capture once perfectly and then bam no sound on the next ( once I close the capture program), Ive tried about everything I think if any body had had to deal with this please let me know


Ive tried v -dub anfd I get unsupported format, iu vcr works great once, and avi_io works great once.

[ATIWONDERIFWORKS]

I wish I could help you. It must have installed this card a dozen times but could never get it to work well with its own software or vdub. But since I gave up on ATI MMC, I have been fairly successful. Mostly using iuVCR. Maybe try saving a setting that works and see if you can repeat it.

[wingstar1]

The only ATI card that works for virtualdub (This software will only support VFW driver) with sound from the purple dongle connections is the connex bt84x chipset circa 1999 and older. The newer card circa 2000-present will not work even if it has the connex bt84x chipset on board, because ATI has changed the hardware setup. I have a newer ATI TV Wonder with a connex bt84x chipset, which is the same as the one on my ATI AIW128 16Mb 2xAGP. The AIW128 has no problem capture video/audio with virtualdub, but the TVWonder will not work. The only way it will capture audio is to feed the audio into the line in of the audio card separately from the purple dongle.

[mgruber]

Only to mention: BT8x8 based cards cannot capture both fields of a frame and perform video overlay, since it uses one field to make the video overlay and the other for the capture app. You MUST always turn "Video Preview" mode on instead of "Overlay".
Then you will get 480 lines (interlaced), but with slow picture refresh (I think this is not a real problem).
Note that you can change the settings of VDub to force "Preview" mode for these drivers and avoid the "Unsupported format" message every time you switch to capture mode.

[bowers32]

I started out with the ATI TV Wonder. It worked great as far as viewing TV on the computer. But the capture quality was crap.

I tried WIN TV 2000 and the capture quality is much better, however, it isn't near as smooth in operating as a tv on your desk top.

I'm wondering if I should get ATI sound/graphics card to see if the quality is better.

[tpday]

I had a similar problem with the ATI AIW. Then, I noticed VCDEasy was intermittently crashing with an "out of memory" type error. Many hours later, I discovered a RAM chip was shot.

Probably has nothing to do with your problem, but hey, don't rule out another problem that might seem unrelated...

[vhelp]

bowers32,

Hows the crap capture in your ATI-TV Wonder??

Mine is great.

Expain a little detail for the difference ATI-TV Wonder vs. Wintv 2000.

Anyways, my setup is:
---------------------
* Windows 98
* ATI Rage Fury Pro (agp) (not used for capturing)
* ATI-TV Wonder (I only like capping at 352x480)
* VFW driver (I used hauppgues version, though not using hauppage card)
* WDM driver (not using, but is listed in avi_io and VD)
* APPs: avi_io and now Virtualdub
* Encoder: TMPGenc 12a
* SVCD or xSVCD cuz I use 352x480

My System specs:
----------------
* Athlon T-Brd 900mhz w/ pc133 128mb ram
* plus (above) specs

I capture mostly from Satalette, and quality is IMO great.
I use avi_io and NOW Virtual dub. I got it to work. And, I'm able to use ONE
filter in VD. I'm currently using the DeInterlace filter during capture - to save
on encoding time. Anything to speed up encoding. Just started testing this
filter biz this evening/latenight, and so far, the quality seems to be pretty
good when I burn to cd!

--------------------------------------
. . .revised web site


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: vhelp on 2001-12-09 02:05:29 ]</font>

[ATIWONDERIFWORKS]

Thanks vhelp.
I am going to try and setup my tv wonder card they same way. It seems to me for most people its a matter actually getting the card to work more than quality issues. In reference to:

*VFW driver (I used hauppages version, though not using hauppage card)

The driver you are using, what specific hauppage card is it for or are they all the same?

Also, when running VD where does it look for the drivers?

Can you tell me what your device manager listings look like?

Currently mine are as follows:

-ATI TV Wonder BtCap, WDM Audio Capture
-ATI TV Wonder BtCap, WDM Video Capture
-ATI TV Wonder Tv tuner, Phillips WDM TvTuner
-ATI TV Wonder WDM Audio Crossbar
-ATI TV Wonder WDM Video Crossbar

Thanks

[ATIWONDERIFWORKS]

I cant seem to get the link to TMPGenc v.12A to download .
Does anyone know of another?

[vhelp]

atiwonder,

I don't know where you're getting your figures and stuff in your device,
but mine is nothing like yours.

Anyways, tells me something, how old is your card? That is, the date
your got it. Mine was from 3/2001

I read something here that ATI may have updated this card with new
drivers and/or hardware and drivers.
This is seeming closer to why you're having trouble.

Just like what sracer was telling me back in 3 or 4 of this year about my
Dazzle dvc I - that they (in short) jimmied their drivers (or hardware) and
that's why I can't get the same quality sracer get with his card.
You may be experiencing this same thing.

Hay, the box does say "we reserve the right" . . ."ta screw you", he, he....
...zwhat they left off...

Ok, the VFW driver I am using is, well, I can't tell ya. I have sooo many
of these (or had) and lost track of which version and for which capture
card I D/L'ed them for. I just remembered I saw one laying around inside
my harddrive last week, while I was cleaning/deleteing all/some of these
duplicate looking files. But, I'm not gonna do that any more. ...as you
can see why.

I may put additional settings on my website for CURRENT capture devices
I use at the time of my experiments or projects, with images. Maybe!
So, look on over to my website if you think you need add'L info or
something, cause I may have what you're looking for (not software)

Later.

[ATIWONDERIFWORKS]

Well I got my card about a week ago. I tried the wintv drivers and vdub worked without audio. ( same thing happened when I tried the ATI 6.3 drivers, which came on the installation CD ) In the device manager only an audio and capute driver show up. So I switched back to the WDM drivers which are the updated ones from ATI7.1 . I must give kudos to iuVCR as it seems to work for me pretty well even though the programmer states its not recommended for WIN98.

Maybe I just have to wait for Vdub to come out with a version that will work with the ATI drivers.

I tried the wrapper and got video but no sound. Is there a way to change the source of the audio in vdub?