Hi everyone. I have a problem with my AIW Radeon that I can't get an answer to and it seems the opposite of what most people are getting. When I try to capture video from a VCR using Composite or S-Video, I have no problem with the audio, provided of course I use the Line-In input on my SoundBlaster Live Platinum, but the video signal (from purple dongle) doesn't come through. Just a black screen. All physical connections are OK, I have no other problems with the card (no yellow !'s on any component in System Properties, TV from Cable input works fine). I also tried several different SCART adapters, but nothing worked. From what I gathered, my problem is that the install routine for AIW (using install disc and then upgrading to 4.13.7075 drivers and MMC 7.1) didn't install a video capture driver. In Control Panel/Multimedia/Advanced I only get the Microsoft capture driver, which doesn't work. Using Win 98 (2K can't recognize some peripherals I need). Can anyone help me with this or at least point me in the right direction? Big thanks in advance. I'll appreciate any hint.

PS: Apologies for the long post, but I wanted to give as many setup details as I could. Thanks again.

-- Marco Pensante (uglysunday@yahoo.com), May 09, 2001

Answers

What is your processor and mother board? Does it capture correctly in Tuner mode?

I encountered the same problem when I moved an ATI All IN Wonder Pro (8 meg) to an AMD 300MMX, can't remember the MB manufacturer (PCWARE???) but it had onboard video/audio (disabled) with a SIS chipset. Was never able to resolve the problem. It does work fine in Tuner mode though.

Check to make sure that the correct capture device is present and selected in ATI's TV player.

-- me (snake_mountain@hotmail.com), May 10, 2001.

snake_mountain: thanks for replying. Processor is a Pentium III/800, MB is an ASUS CUSL2. It does have an onboard video controller (not sure about the chipset) but I disabled it in the BIOS to use the AIW as my graphics card, so I don't think that has any effect. When you talk about tuner capture, I suppose you're referring to recording from TV application with cable/antenna input, and that works fine. As I said, my only problem is capturing from a VCR. I don't have a camera, so I can't try capturing from that to see if the video problem is from any external source or only my VCR. In the TV app, the capture driver is "ATI Rage Theater Video" (can't remember the exact name right now, but I'm sure it's along those lines), but it only seems to work from regular TV programs. I tried using Videowave 4 to capture, same exact story: audio is OK, video is black. (BTW, I also tried different size captures, 352x288, 640x480, NTSC, PAL etc... no luck). So my idea is that the problem involves whole system, not just the AIW. I need a system-wide capture driver, same as when you have a video codec installed and any media player app will play that particular kind of encoding. I thought that driver would be the ATI Theater Video for every app, but it looks like I'm wrong. So, think you see any solution? In any case, I appreciate your help. Thanks.

-- Marco Pensante (uglysunday@yahoo.com), May 10, 2001.

Marco,

Your PC hardware sounds excellent. I doubt that it would be the problem. The one avenue that I was never able to check out my AMD K6/SIS system was the S-video/RCA-composite pig-tail input cable to the ATI card. Having no spare, I could not eliminate it as the possible culprit. Shopping ATI's Web site didn't show any spare cables for sell. ATI Tech support never responded to any of my e- mail.

On my AMD K6 system, I swapped all hardware, installed W95, 98, and 98SE, and moved interrupts around. Still no video input through RCA jacks.

Sorry I couldn't be of any more help.

-- me (snake_mountain@hotmail.com), May 10, 2001.

Your ATI video driver has problems with MMC 7.1. Go to ATI's web page and download the latest video drivers. Version 5.something is out now. ATI's web page states that version 4.X drivers don't work correctly with MMC 7.1. Also, make sure you have Direct X version 8 or you will also have problems.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@sita.int), May 10, 2001.

We have a Radeon, and found that the cable itself is faulty. If we wiggle it around long enough, the picture comes through. We're returning ours; possible that yours has the same problem?

-- Meghan (nospam@spam.net), July 07, 2001.

First of all, sorry for my English 'couse I'm from Ukraine. I had the same problem with capture driver. Looking up for solve of this problem on ati-site I saw this: "...1. Install ATI Multimedia Center (MMC) (optional) as follows (rebooting as prompted): Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 and !!!!Windows Media Encoder 7.0!!!! must be installed prior to attempting to install MMC..." I did like said there and since have no problems. Wish you good luck! Greetings from Ukraine!

-- Steven (v_relsu@ua.fm), April 21, 2003.

I believe I had this problem too. However, I read the readme.txt files on the ATI setup disks and found that there is a very strict sequence in which the ATI drivers, video capture, and multimedia software must be uninstalled and installed when upgrading to the next version of Catalyst multimedia. If you dont follow the sequence exactly the video capture doesnt work correctly.

-- Russ Hunter (RustieH@msn.com), January 14, 2004.