HDTV Wonder Discussion

[grog]

MyDVD can handle the HD MPG2 files. It does take it a while to process a large image. But it works. Frankly I have been using the ATI Library to downgrade the content to MPEG DVD High-Def and then go to DVD.

Greg

Originally Posted by xsvcd

You can not edit the HD MPG2 file with any program. None of them recognize it. However, WME 9 will convert it and then you can use a free program called asftools to edit the converted copy.

[Peanut-Butter]

Well i'm happy to report my problems have been solved

it appears i had some conflicting issues between ATI's software and TrueImageMonitor.exe (part of Acronis True Image) All is well now and i'm extremely happy with this card.

[tristancarton]

Originally Posted by tristancarton

LONG POST but worth reading through if you are having problems with hdtv wonder.

PG, thanks for the quick reply. I installed all of the creative junk and ended up finding the dolby digital/dts setting in the audio hq-device control-decoder (this actually isn't in the creative surround mixer) Enabled it so that my audigy 2 zs was doing the decoding.

Started up ati dvd with "passthrough using cyberlink audio rendered (ATI-DTV)" highlighted. Ran thx speaker tests from t2 special edition dvd. Have 5.1 discrete channels. Sweet. (was missing the surround left and right before)

Opened up dtv portion of mmc and switched from 2 channel to "passthrough using cyberlink audio rendered (ATI-DTV)." Sound would start in 5.1(I could tell because announcer was all through center channel) and then totally cut out after a few seconds.(No sound at all) Close dtv try again. Again the sound would cut out. Hmmm. My thoughts, irq problem.

Need less to say I let my audigy 2zs, hdtv wonder, and radeon 9800 pro duke it out on the irq merry go round. At the end of the fight I got all three items to be on completely non shared irqs(not shared with anything let alone themselves)

The 5.1 sound issue that was cutting out when trying to pass through to my audigy 5.1 halted so have the little blips I had heard when opening new browser windows and surfing the net. (I think my wireless network card was sharing an irq with either my videocard or hdtv wonder for a while)

Everone having problems or small blips go into your control panel-system- hardware-device manger and go to the tab that says view resources by type. Expand interrupt request and check what items are sharing irqs and especially take note if you see the videocard, hdtv wonder, or sound card sharing any. If they aren't you are good to go and your problems are caused by something other than irqs. If they are, open up your dust filled motherboard manuals and check what items share irqs with others. Then start the pci/irq merry go round (These can't be switched in windows, it is determined by what pci slot each one of those devices is in) and keep booting into windows and checking to see if you have seperated them.

Best wishes. Hope this helps. Now I just need to determine why my regular cable input won't come up(it says unable to initialize) and pc check says I don't have directx 9 installed(i have 9.0c) and that I don't have wdm drivers isntalled when I most certainly do. PM if you have any questions.

BTW someone posted earlier that he fixed a few things by contacting ati over the phone and them helping him do the irq merry go round.(Thanks for getting my thought process in that direction)

update a few days later: irq may not have been the issue with sound pass through problems. When running newest audigy drivers 5.12.1.444 dated 6/23/04 and hardware acceleration tab at highest in directx 9.0c and server 2003 dxdiag window, the pass through would not work right.(sound would cut out) If i moved the hardware accleration down two notches to basic the sound pass though problems would vanish. I didn't want to run sound at basic hardware accleration settings so decided to revert audigy drivers back to 5.12.5.443 dated 2/23/04 then to 5.12.5.441 dated 10/21/2003. Neither of these helped(when hardware acc was at the highest pass through audio wouldn't function correctly) In addition I also tried lowering as well as raising the pci latency to no avail.

Last but not least I reverted back to the original disk files from my audigy 2 cd. These are version 5.12.6.402 dated 7/10/2003. Whoo hoo hardware acceleration at highest and 5.1 passthrough works fine.(5.1 sound and sound is not cutting out)

Summary: Be wary of audigy driver updates. Seems as though the newer audigy 2 zs drivers and the hdtv wonder don't like each other. I am sending an email to ati to let them know about this problem with the audigy drivers(although I would guess the problems actually exists in creatives drivers not ati)

BTW- Sorry I didn't update the original post i had up. I figured more people read the end of the discussion and this discovery seems fairly important.(Probably a lot of people with audigy 2 zs and hdtv wonder trying to run 5.1 dolby digital sound)

[mahi]

Here is the thing i cant stand about the hdtv wonder.

ota hd is nice but qam is special. 50 bucks more and i would take the rw2 and official qam support. Its interesting that the card has the ability to do qam but cant support it because of legal reasons. Which leads me to believe that there is some way around this. I need to buy the card because i lost my aiw9800pro reciently in a freak nb fan falling off ic7-g accident. Which leads me to order an x800xt-pe. I in turn will miss my aiw features. So, does the card do tv on demand? Will having these 2 basically replace my aiw and give me more for my money? its almost painful to order the card for 165 (buy.com has a 10 dollar off deal and a 175 price plus free shipping.

the card so far seems interesting, but i wonder if i wait for the usb2 tv wonder if it would be a better buy because it may come with the remote wonder2. Which in the future with a cable box makes my the tuner upgrade worth it. ATI didnt drop the ball on his one, it doesnt seem as if they passed it that far either. Every time i get my credit card ready to splurge i find myself doing research to find if its possible to hack qam support, or somehow get it to work with a cable box, or something that can have me watching the sopranos on my pc. Maybe not in HD, but at least giving me the ability to record it. Heck for 200 bucks i might as well get a tivo. See what i mean, not to down you guys purchase because the card isnt half bad. Its just that it seems a little incomplete, and i can only predict that next year a card 5 times better than this one may come out.

any thoughts on hacking itto watch qamhd, or getting a remote wonder 2 ir blaster setup to make me at least able to watch hbo on my computer? or something? or maybe it comes with a coupon for immeasurable joy or something?

[xsvcd]

I started getting those audio dropouts last night. They didn’t line up with my HD cable box so I know it was something with the HDTV wonder. However, there was a temp solution. I would just click the esc button to go to medium screen and then hit the full screen button again. Apparently, easylook is causing the problem. I sure hope ATI takes care of this for the next HDTV wonder drivers.

[doctj]

Originally Posted by mahi

Here is the thing i cant stand about the hdtv wonder.

ota hd is nice but qam is special. 50 bucks more and i would take the rw2 and official qam support. Its interesting that the card has the ability to do qam but cant support it because of legal reasons. Which leads me to believe that there is some way around this. I need to buy the card because i lost my aiw9800pro reciently in a freak nb fan falling off ic7-g accident. Which leads me to order an x800xt-pe. I in turn will miss my aiw features. So, does the card do tv on demand? Will having these 2 basically replace my aiw and give me more for my money? its almost painful to order the card for 165 (buy.com has a 10 dollar off deal and a 175 price plus free shipping.

the card so far seems interesting, but i wonder if i wait for the usb2 tv wonder if it would be a better buy because it may come with the remote wonder2. Which in the future with a cable box makes my the tuner upgrade worth it. ATI didnt drop the ball on his one, it doesnt seem as if they passed it that far either. Every time i get my credit card ready to splurge i find myself doing research to find if its possible to hack qam support, or somehow get it to work with a cable box, or something that can have me watching the sopranos on my pc. Maybe not in HD, but at least giving me the ability to record it. Heck for 200 bucks i might as well get a tivo. See what i mean, not to down you guys purchase because the card isnt half bad. Its just that it seems a little incomplete, and i can only predict that next year a card 5 times better than this one may come out.

any thoughts on hacking itto watch qamhd, or getting a remote wonder 2 ir blaster setup to make me at least able to watch hbo on my computer? or something? or maybe it comes with a coupon for immeasurable joy or something?

You can watch HBO SD by just hooking up your digital cable box to your card by svideo/composite. I taped most of the Sopranos and all of 24 that way. QAM is more of a DRM issue if I was in ATI's shoes I wouldn't get into that swamp. The much vaunted Fusion III with QAM has a lot of issues if you browse AVS forums very few people have gotten it to work and view QAM broadcast.

[mahi]

but changing channels? and things like that...we need a good ir blaster setup...cause using my comcast remote annoys me...i want full control from my pc...like schedule a show by name to record it if i am out..not going through the motions of remembering channels etc..

[vhold]

Just got it, put it in, wrestled with the installer crashing for awhile, then it totally messing up my Radeon 9700 stock drivers.. got that fixed.. now it .. runs.. But it's almost constantly stuttering, even on stations with 88% signal strength.. anybody else having this problem?

HDTV Wonder
Radeon 9700 Pro
Audigy 2 ZS (uh oh)
NForce2 Mobo
AMD 3000+

Right now the only thing sharing IRQs are the HDTV wonder, my Raid controller and the USB Host controller.. thats a possibility, but at least I have my main video card and sound card on their own IRQs.

I'm wondering if its also possible it could be a codec issue? One station comes in all cropped and zoomed in, theres nothing I can do about it, its just like a bad decode.

PC Check claims that both DirectX and the capture driver installation are bad, even though I just reinstalled DirectX and the drivers, and the instructions to go to the website to get the Capture Driver is fairly useless since nothing is available for download there. I guess I'll just play with reinstalling components from the CD.. or something.

edit : This might be a hint, when I go to uninstall the ATI Decoder, it seems to hang forever trying 'Removing backup files' The msiexec.exe process is hanging at 95% CPU. I'll let it sit for awhile.. Man.. so far not so good ATI.. This is like my first AIW all over again which took me weeks to get running halfway decently and I almost abandoned ATI forever.

update : So I created a new user on my box and that totally killed all the installation issues, but I still get the stuttering, so that was a red herring.

update: Ok, now it, the video card, sound card, and hard drive controller are all on their own IRQs. Exact same stuttering still, no change...

[vhold]

Just read a MSDN post about how 'Removing backup files' could really be doing something else. I killed it a few times before after waiting several minutes thinking whatever operation it was trying to do was complete and just hanging. That might have created my stuttering/PC-check problems. Ugh.

Perhaps I need something along the lines of a total driver/codec clean out.. I don't know. Ugh. Looking more like a total windows reinstall really. Not pretty.

[DaVinci42]

Ok. I just installed my HDTV wonder.

PROBLEMS:

1) It was working fine on install & then after some changes it would stutter constantly. I figured out that it was because I changed it from "Decode & Downmix to /2 speakers/", to "Pass through to audio device /Cyberlink Audio Renderer/". Changing it back fixed it, but I want 5.1 sound.

I have an original SB Audigy hooked up to 5.1 speakers through analog. So how do I fix this? And why is Cyberlink Audio Renderer the only choice that shows up?

2) Some of my stations have strong signals but still won't show up. I live in San Francisco.

3) A set of PBS stations has a signal that jumps up & down from 0% - 80% so that its unwatchable.

4) One of my stations seems to be zoomed in on part of the picture.

EDIT:

Forgot to mention what I'm running.

Athlon XP 2400+(2Ghz)
512MB RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (Drivers from the HDTV wonder disk)
SB Audigy - Newest drivers as of 2 months ago (Still the newest)

[vhold]

Is there any way to totally turn off the DVR feature and just have it play live? It plays perfectly for me and just stutters every couple seconds as if it's during the buffer write that it gimps out. I'm going to try getting it off my hard drive controller's IRQ. Easier said then done.

Update: I did get everything on it's own IRQ, no effect. This is nuts.

Update: Fast Write was off for Doom 3 stability, turned it on.. and it seems to have -nearly- fixed it although the occasional stuttering is pretty evil. I was being kinda unscientific and also moved my AGP apeture from 512 to 256 (I have a gig of ram)

I can't do -anything- at all while the TV app is running which is a bit disappointing, I really.. really wish I could shut off the DVR functionality. I'm going to relatively enjoy this while it's working then try to isolate what exactly affected it.. its still not perfect, hopefully it's AGP apature and I can improve it.

[tristancarton]

Originally Posted by DaVinci42

Ok. I just installed my HDTV wonder.

PROBLEMS:

1) It was working fine on install & then after some changes it would stutter constantly. I figured out that it was because I changed it from "Decode & Downmix to /2 speakers/", to "Pass through to audio device /Cyberlink Audio Renderer/". Changing it back fixed it, but I want 5.1 sound.

I have an original SB Audigy hooked up to 5.1 speakers through analog. So how do I fix this? And why is Cyberlink Audio Renderer the only choice that shows up?

2) Some of my stations have strong signals but still won't show up. I live in San Francisco.

3) A set of PBS stations has a signal that jumps up & down from 0% - 80% so that its unwatchable.

4) One of my stations seems to be zoomed in on part of the picture.

EDIT:

Forgot to mention what I'm running.

Athlon XP 2400+(2Ghz)
512MB RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (Drivers from the HDTV wonder disk)
SB Audigy - Newest drivers as of 2 months ago (Still the newest)

Davinci read the long posts I put up. I post them here so I can help other hdtv wonder users and in turn them help me. Reading and searching can sometimes be your best friend.

#1) Read my post three posts above yours. New audigy drivers do not like the hdtv wonder when using pass through mode either revert back to older driver set or set hardware aceleration tab down two notches in directx config.

#2) Play with your antenna in different positions as well as buying a cheap db booster.

#3) No idea why that station is jumping up and down. Are you next to a high building or skyscraper. Play with the signal strenth portion of the dtv program. It is your best friend.

#4) You sure it is zoomed in and not just a regular 4:3 non hd show that is then upconverted to a 16:9 1080i or 720p feed and thereby creating black bars on side.

[DaVinci42]

Originally Posted by tristancarton

Davinci read the long posts I put up. I post them here so I can help other hdtv wonder users and in turn them help me. Reading and searching can sometimes be your best friend.

#1) Read my post three posts above yours. New audigy drivers do not like the hdtv wonder when using pass through mode either revert back to older driver set or set hardware aceleration tab down two notches in directx config.

#2) Play with your antenna in different positions as well as buying a cheap db booster.

#3) No idea why that station is jumping up and down. Are you next to a high building or skyscraper. Play with the signal strenth portion of the dtv program. It is your best friend.

#4) You sure it is zoomed in and not just a regular 4:3 non hd show that is then upconverted to a 16:9 1080i or 720p feed and thereby creating black bars on side.

Thanks..

1) Its better but still not fixed. After installing older drivers it will be fine if I change the setting to 5.1, but if I change channels the sound will start to stutter. ATI &/or Creative need to fix their drivers ASAP.

2) These are like 90% signals, so I'm wondering if its a software problem. The only signals I've received so far are 480i & 1080i. I'm wondering if the problem has something to do with progressive scan since the stations I'm missing are showing 480p & 720p.

3) I figured this one out. I happen to have some PBS station about 180 degrees from where I'm pointing my antenna. If I turn it around I get these signals & my normal stations start to bounce. So not exactly a problem. Just part of the nature of directional antenna's.

4) I'm positive it's zoomed in. I have plenty of other HD stations that act like you describe. I'm only getting the upper left quarter of the picture. I can tell because when people stand in what should be the center of the frame I only see half their face. It's just weird. I'm wondering if the card is misreading the type of signal being sent.

[magius]

Hiya guys, been reading the forums and it seems I'm not the only one having this problem. Almos everythin in the MMC suit works fine, except for detection (test) and the analog TV app. In my case is just says that is can't initialize the video. Seems that the Capture driver is hosed. Under the Configuration panel there is no selection for TV Capture Source and it says the Driver is unsupported.

All this with MMC9.01. Installing 9.02 (which showed up as 9.03 on the Win Unistall) didn't help at all, same error.

Someone mentioned earlier that they installed the ATI tuner drivers by adding them through the "Add Hardware" wizard. Fine, the only thing is that ATI doesn't show up under my driver selections, nor the CD seems to have the correct drivers.

As you can guess Im a little frustrated. DTV works fine, the picture is excellent. CPU utilization runs high, around the 80s% almost all the time.

This is with a brand spanking new install of WinXp with SP2.
Specs:
P4 3GHz
1GB memory
ATI 9800 Pro 128Megs
ATI 9200se
SB Audigy 2

The cards don't share IRQs between themselves, but they do share them with USB. I run multiple displays too.

Any help is appreciated (or at least words of comfort)!

[Chris000001]

I was having the same problem with the analog tuner not being able to start. I went to the ati support directory it installs on your computer, into catalyst folder and then into the wdm folder and clicked on setup.exe to manually install the capture driver. (C:\ATI\SUPPORT\wxp-w2k-catalyst-8-042-040803a-016701c\WDM\setup.exe)

I also noticed it didn't show up on custom catalyst(4.8) install like it usually does.

It worked for me after that. I gave the same instruction to someone in another thread and he said it did not work for him, but it might be worth a try.

[vhold]

So... I'm pretty happy now I guess.. I can't entirely tell what significantly improved the stuttering for me, it really seems to be some kind of vague combination of:

Fast Write: Off -> On ( Was off for Doom 3 )
Agp Aperture (sp?): 512 -> 64
TuneXP: Turn off "Increase CPU Priority" tweak
TuneXP: Turn off "Speed-up Windows IRQ Handling" tweak

I know one of the first 2 had a significant impact, and its kind of hard to say, but it seemed to improve slightly when I turned off the final two. I'm into territory now where actual reception problems are the main problem and not system ones, aka, I can achieve 99.5% stability on a few stations, so I'm pretty happy. It's just disappointing that I can do virtually nothing while the DTV app is running without resulting in skips, I have a dual monitor setup and I was hoping I could run DTV flawlessly on the primary and websurf on the secondary. It's definitely more stable then it was, but I have a lot of guests and I feel bad to have any stuttering at all while they are watching just because I'm trying to do something else.

[nortus]

Originally Posted by DaVinci42

4) I'm positive it's zoomed in. I have plenty of other HD stations that act like you describe. I'm only getting the upper left quarter of the picture. I can tell because when people stand in what should be the center of the frame I only see half their face. It's just weird. I'm wondering if the card is misreading the type of signal being sent.

You're not alone. I have that same problem. ABC is zoomed to the top left corner. All the other channels work smoothly.

[Andrew 1961]

I'm GOOD w/the new release. I installed Cat 4.8 Display Driver OVER TOP which asked me what to do and I chose REMOVE. Then I installed Display Driver 4.8, then Control Panel, and WDM. Since I did NOT use the Cat UNinstall this time I still had the EasyLaunck toolbar there all along. Then I loaded DVD Decoder over top, which I had to download ATi's setup file. Finally, MMC 9.02 over top and answered their NEW popup question to 'UPDATE to 9.02 from an earlier version.'

I did NOT reinstall the DAO as it's the same 9-0-0-0 as before. I also did not uninstall MMC 9.1 (OK, so there's some debate if it's 9.0 or 9.01 but ATi JUST changed this format to 9.02 in August's release), RW 2.3, GemStar (the guide+), or those I said I installer over top of the existing s/w.

FWIW, I thought I'd SEE more changes, but it performs JUST like the one I replaced.

[DaVinci42]

Originally Posted by nortus

You're not alone. I have that same problem. ABC is zoomed to the top left corner. All the other channels work smoothly.

That's the same channel as me. I'm guessing it's a problem with the card. Has ANYBODY been able to receive a 720p signal properly? I believe that's what ABC uses. I'm going to email tech support right now.

[EMunEeE]

I just got my HDTV Wonder and it is wonderful. I have to go buy the amplifier cause DTV signals in my room suck, but the whole MMC package is great..especially eazylook.
I'll post back with a more in depth analysis

[Peanut-Butter]

ati just put out new drivers for the hdtv wonder. who's going to try them first?

[magius]

I'm going to... we'll see if they solve the high CPU usage issue...

[DaVinci42]

I have more info about that zoomed in ABC channel. Apparently it will only show ANYTHING if the previous channel was 480i. If it was 1080i I only get the sound. For some reason the software is attempting to use the settings for the channel that was tuned just before changing to ABC. My card just doesn't seem to want to tune in 720p or 480p channels. I wish I could manually choose what resolution certain channels tried to diplay at.

[Grimister]

Well the DTV drivers before update was version dated 5-17-2004 ver 3.0.83.2008

since the update 7-22-2004 ver 3.0.83.2012

[DaVinci42]

Originally Posted by Peanut-Butter

ati just put out new drivers for the hdtv wonder. who's going to try them first?

I haven't noticed any differences yet. None of the problems I'm having were fixed. Maybe the next update will at least fix the 5.1 sound.

BTW. I noticed that I have no problem with 5.1 sound when playing a recorded show.

[tristancarton]

Originally Posted by Peanut-Butter

ati just put out new drivers for the hdtv wonder. who's going to try them first?

Did the whole shabang (driver cleaner, safe mode, and rebooting all of the time) with the new files.

5.1 sound problem with newest audigy 2 drivers hasn't been fixed(where the pass through doesn't work with newest audigy drivers when they are accelerated all the way in directx)

I did notice the actual wdm drivers are later (as posted by grimster)

Haven't noticed any less cpu usage or more fluid video/sound.

Overall nice to see they are actually working on wdm drivers but I really can't tell any difference between what I had installed before.

Oh one last thing. MMC pc check still says I don't have directx installed and I don't have the capture infs installed.

Keep working at it ati. We love the cards. Just need some work on the drivers/software.

[Peanut-Butter]

well since you guys didn’t have any new problems i went ahead and installed these. So far i can't tell any difference. Everything appears to be the same. I have not tried the pass through option with my Audigy2 yet. I guess i’ve been lucky so far, no major problems ever since I uninstalled Acronis True Image7.

[magius]

Same as you guys, not really much of a difference. CPU usage in the high 80s, goes down to 40s, 60s and up again. Sound limited to Stereo/Pro Logic, and no Analog TV. Try as I might the capture drivers doesn't seem to install...

[AcuraTLSFan]

Anyone else with HDTV Wonder having problems with the MMC TV/DTV starting up? When I first installed it on WinXP Pro SP1, it started and someimes it would give me "Unable to start TV". Then it tells you to do a "PC Check", it says that I don't have DirectX installed or the Capture Drivers, but I do.

So i decided to do a clean WinXP Pro SP2 install. My DTV works perfect, but now my analog TV tuner doesn't work at all, keeps giving me "Unable to start"

Anyone else with this problem, or a fix to it. Thanks.

[BBQGrill]

Originally Posted by Peanut-Butter

ati just put out new drivers for the hdtv wonder. who's going to try them first?

Where to find the new drivers?

I would like to install these to see if if fixes my problem. No analog TV.