ATI AIW 128, MMC 7.2 Not Freezing on Record Anymore!!!

[djsdjs]

OK - I've been bashing my head on this for a couple days. I have had this card for a couple years and finally wanted to start using it to record TV. But it would freeze when trying to save either a scheduled recording or an on the fly recording.

I got so good at completely removing the AIW drivers and MMC that I could do it in my sleep. (BTW most documented procedures miss a bunch of redistributable files from a company called "Lead Technologies" that end up in System32 - starting with LT* and LF*)

Even though 7.2 is the XP compatible version of MMC for AIW 128 I set the XP compatibility mode to "Windows 98/ Windows ME" and I seem to have no problems saving many, many captures in a row. Still testing - but it looks good.

You set this by right clicking "ATIMMC.EXE" and selecting the "Compatibility" tab and selecting "Run this program in compatilibity mode for:" and set it to "Windows 98/ Windows ME"

I did notice that playing with the TV on demand gives a blue screen - but I don't use that anyway.

Fyi,
D.

[Amish Electrician]

Weird cause i have the same one & i used it to for 1yr with no problems as a pvr.Did you ever try a clean os install.

[lordsmurf]

Interesting.

[djsdjs]

OK,
Looks like I spoke too soon.

I am going to try some other compatibility tweaks as well as possibly run the compatibility analyzer in the Application Compatibility Toolkit.

However, I also noticed files called fileac16.dll and fileac32.dll in the main directory. It would seem like they have to do with accessing the file system and it seems like this problem occurs right as the system is about to copy the file or when it is about to ask me where to copy it. I also noticed that one of the documented (but never solved) problems is when MMC and the temp file are on a FAT32 volume, but capture is to NTFS. I am all NTFS - but I am wondering if there are other file system oddities with these two DLLs?

I have also been trying the temp and permanent files on 40GB drives as well as a 200 GB drive (which requires a special controller) - same results. However, I noticed that MMC 7.1 on W2K (dual boot on same system) does not see the 200 GB drive.

Has anyone tried just swapping out updated versions of these two filesystem DLLs files?

I have not tried a clean load of XP because of the amount of work and the fact that it *should* be unnecessary. I know that is the ultimate clean solution - but I am going to try a few other things before resorting to that. I load all kinds of other DVD / video utilities on this box for authoring - so if it is one of them that is throwing off MMC - I woud need to maintain a seperate XP boot forever.

D.

[Amish Electrician]

Ok i went & looked at my tv system lastnight i am using mmc 7.1 on it not 7.2.
Your wasting more time trying to dig out the problem then doing a fresh install
Norton Ghost is your friend try it.

[djsdjs]

I did a fresh install. Loaded only the video driver and MMC and my sound card driver so I could get sound. I get the exact same intermittant freeze up behavior when clicking the button to stop recording. On quick blasts like 30 seconds of recording it seems to work - leave it over 30 minutes and it freezes.

Amish, If you are using 7.1 are you on W2K - or did you install 7.1 despite the compatibility warnings for XP?

[djsdjs]

P.S. - fresh install is on a seperate drive letter as is the program files directory - so there is no co-mingling of any messes that might have been created by previous installs.

[Amish Electrician]

OO you using win2k not xp im on xp.
Fill in your profile
Also you said you put sound drivers in i have had problems in the past with sound blaster drivers & the AIW