ATI TV Wonder VE problems with TV signal

[Admiral Falcon]

My TV Wonder VE card was working happily until sometime in February, when mysterious problems started popping up. The image attached to this post provides an example of this problem.








See the black bar at the very top of the image? The pattern of the grey bands inside initially led me to believe that this was noise or static that my card had trouble dealing with.

But that explanation didn't fit with the other symptoms: the fact that this 'noise' was channel- and even show-specific ruled out a static problem. Also, sometimes there is no top bar of 'noise', but rather a 3-4 pixel wide vertical black bar on the left side of the image. In some shows, the top line of 'noise' causes the video image to lose some of its information - this is most noticible as a regular 1-pixel 'jump' or semi-fade of drawn horizontal lines in animation. This looks bad even when both fields are captured (NTSC 29.97 format), but at 320x240, this vertical shifting completely ruins the video.

I read a reference somewhere that ATI's cards had trouble with handling TV signals, that sometimes the card rendered encoding sent along with the signal into the video image. I don't know if this is a failure of the hardware or of the card's drivers, but I have no idea how to fix it. It's not caused by anything cable-related, as hooking up a standard TV/FM antenna resulted in the same problem. Nor is it a problem related solely to the RF jack of the card - the composite-in has the same errors.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? And if so, does anybody know how to remedy it? (Leave it to this crappy 4-year-old machine to experience all the freaky, undocumented errors...)

[MOVIEGEEK]

The Wonder VE was my first capturecard and I would try installing the card in another PCI slot and/or reinstalling MMC7.1,if that doesn't help I'm afraid the card is shot and hopefully still under warranty.
P.S.You might try pulling out your radiocard(due to RF interferance)