Trouble with DVD Workshop

[pcostanza]

I purchased DVD Workshop ($$$) after talking to many people and reading lots of forums on the net. I have a 1.7 system (Dell) running XP Pro and 512 ram with 1 60 and 1 120 hard drive. I have the ATI AIW 8500DV card and the Sony 500A DVD writer. Most programs I've tried don't fill the bill.
For some reason, when DWS opens I have no problem. It wants to capture immediately from the tv tuner. Whenever I try to capture, I get the standard windows crash error and do I want to send the error to MS..whatever.
I've no idea what's wrong or what settings I should use. DWS support sucks and emails back and forth just state the obvious.
I appreciate any help getting me started.
Thanks

[igalan]

I had a similar problem. But it affected every program that tried to use to capture video (DVD WS, VirtualDub, MyDVD). The problem is still not clear, it was some setting in the WDM captture driver; the only fix that I found was to download a program form AverMedia (I have an AverMedia TV card) to test captures; runing this program fixed all my problems; the name is vidtest.exe or amcap.exe.

[pcostanza]

Thanks Igalan, I'll check it out and see if that works and post back my results.
Paul

[Nolonemo]

Try downloading a capture program called scenalyzer (from scenalyzer.com). That will tell you if you have a computer or DD WS problem.

[igalan]

BTW, you can find the program amcap.exe (vidcap.exe) in http://www.avermedia.uk/. The other sites of Aver Media don't have this program.

[Petco]

Its your ATI, it has an interrupt conflict with another hardware peripheral. ATI sucks because it takes too many interrupts. Its good for laptops because they specifically test that card for the compatibility.

I've used Ulead DVD Workshop and its great. Good choice!

I've tried ATI twice thinking it was me but its there product hogs a lot of your system.

[bayaraa_us]

Maybe try Workshop's 1.3 update on ulead.com

[pcostanza]

Thanks for all the ideas..I'm gonna give em all a try.
I should tell you however, that even taking an avi captured from another program and after importing it into DWS and trying to view it, the program crashes. I've uninstalled and reinstalled and have the 1.3 update. Like I said before, the support sucks and the few emails I've gotten back have me doing what I've already done.

[igalan]

This is different, the problem does not seem related to the wdm capture drivers. It looks a problem with the videocard creating the overlay surface... Can you play DVDs without crashes? or avi files?
Maybe it's a IRQ related problem, as Petco suggested. I would try to manually assign the IRQs in the BIOS so the videocard is not sharing the IRQ with anything. I did this a long time ago, so now on my computer each PCI card has a non shared IRQ; this means less problems, hibernate and suspende always work fine.

[pcostanza]

I think I've fixed part of the problem with DWS. First bare with me for a moment....in order to use my old HI8 tapes to capture I used my Canon ZM45C as a passthru. To do this I have to go thru the menu to the camcorder set up to set the "av-dv out" to "on". This has worked fine only in Studio 8 not an any other program.
So I set my av-dv out to off and I can now capture directly thru my Canon. This won't help for my old tapes (I'll have to record to Canon and then capture=more time/work) but I know it's not my system.
HOWEVER, I still can't bring into DWS any previously saved AVI or MPEG file without it crashing.
I'm halfway there and I really appreciate the help and answers here.
I'll keep trying.
Paul