Theatre 550 Pro & Vista bugs

[Kato-2]

I thought I would at least report these bugs I have observed when using my Theatre 550 Pro under Vista Home Premium & Media Centre in the vain hope they may be fixed.

With ATI driver v6.14.10.225 16/12/2006 available on ATI's site recordings refuse to stop and will hang Media Centre if you attempt to stop the recording manually. Even if you kill media centre through the task manager the recording icon is till present in the systray.

With the ATI driver v6.14.10.226 04/01/2007 available through Windows Update something causes the recordings video to stutter (audio is fine) but I have unable to locate exactly what it is as some recordings are fine and others are not. However the stop recording bug above is fixed in this release.

My best guess it it may be S3 related ?

System specifications;
Athlon 64 3200+ Cool & Quiet enabled
2GB of RAM
GeForce 7300 display driver 101.41
Realtek HD Audio driver 1.61
Gigabyte GA-K8N51PVMT-9 motherboard
Windows Vista Home Premium

Edit: Just a small update after further testing I cannot nail down the stuttering problem, I set MCE to record a program on discovery channel and it work just fine. The later I switched to LiveTV and it stuttered for a moment but then was fine. later I set it to record another program all in the same afternoon and this one was ruined with stuttering in the video all the way through however it was not quite as bad as it was in previous affected recordings.

Maybe Cool & Quiet has something to do with it I will disable that and see what happens.

[Kato-2]

Okay after some more messing about I have tracked down the source of the problem though I do to know what it is but the event log in Vista captures it;

Error:

Event info: ERROR: SqmApiWrapper.TimerAccumulate failed; Win32 GetLastError returned 10000105
Process: Default Domain
Object Name: Media Centre Guide

Details tab;

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
<Provider Name="Media Center Guide" />
<EventID Qualifiers="0">0</EventID>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>0</Task>
<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2007-03-31T11:23:20.000Z" />
<EventRecordID>713</EventRecordID>
<Channel>Media Center</Channel>
<Computer>Rob-HTPC</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
- <EventData>
<Data>Event Info: ERROR: SqmApiWrapper.TimerAccumulate failed; Win32 GetLastError returned 10000105 Process: DefaultDomain Object Name: Media Center Guide</Data>
<Binary>2F5345AABB4FD1E93BE440DE77597DF67589C6270F2F3677F532385C62CA06336A221389F2BAE764D8C0A4DF20A9 68DA8A2E8A109FB5E7DFADC7CDFBE58C1C2923A09B887C0D9D1AE50C2A7B3F73C8C98560A2F02D78B3966A56E48CBA7BD907 D2DAD41653F2053AA6B532543F5B1F2E760E25C82190E9EF8D1A2B2997AF07FF</Binary>
</EventData>
</Event>

Anyone from ATI have any idea what that means the recording fails to stop at the allotted time and when you go into recorded TV it hangs media centre so you have to Ctrl Alt Del it to shut it down, the video is then corrupted.

However if you manually stop it before the allotted time the recording in some cases seems to be okay so what's going on ???

[bubbaganoush]

I haven't had any of the problems you described above.

Specs:
Intel Pentium D 940
1GB RAM
Powercolor x1900xtx - Catalyst 7.3
Powercolor Theater 550 Pro - 226 driver
Realtek HD Audio ALC882M - 1.64 driver
ASUS P5WD2-E Premium motherboard
Windows Vista Ultimate x64

[Kato-2]

Thanks for the reply it is very confusing as I cannot understand exactly what is the problem.

One further item I have discovered is that the ATI Catalyst driver installer for 225 would not uninstall saying it was missing a dependency. I tracked that down to the VC++ 2005 files and installed the runtime to give it the missing files and the uninstaller kicked into life after that.

I then re-installed the 225 driver and I'm going to do some more testing hopefully the missing files were part of the problem.


Update: After further testing the missing Visual C++ files for the ATI driver where not the problem. I removed the driver completely and relied on the one provided through Windows Update only but with no change still get corrupted video with certain recordings.

After looking further other the event log I noticed a catalogue of errors all for various items like an ACPI IRQ error or various service and Media Centre errors but they all occur around the same time which leads me to believe after a period of time this bug happens which is what screws up some recordings & is why some are okay.

I thought it may be an IRQ problem so I set PCI IRQ to manual in bios to no effect errors in event log still occurred. I then tried removing the drivers in the device manager related to ACPI which forced a mass driver reinstall of all the components in the system but if anything this made things worse as now the LiveTV in Media Centre stutters all the time.

So I'm at a loss as to the problem my last course of action is to revert the the Microsoft Vista built in driver in the hopes this solves it.

[Kato-2]

Back for more torture

After formatting the machine & clean installing Vista again I only installed the the drivers from Windows Update for the 550 and the video recordings are still the same with corrupted video and not stopping recording at the allotted time.

I can only presume something has either happened to my tuner or something is wrong with the motherboard.

So it looks like spending money is the only course of action.

Update:
The saga comes to a close, after buying a new motherboard, changing the RAM and clean installing Vista again the exact same problem still happens so I can only assume that the card is defective or a unusual bug is present when used with NVIDIA motherboards either way I cannot use it so it will have to be replaced.

[Kato-2]

Success at long last!

So while pondering on what do after this long saga I sent away for the 64-bit Vista disc intending to try it out on another system.

In the time waiting a new bios was released for the motherboard and a new driver by ATI anyway after enabling HPET (High Precision Event Timer) in the bios I installed the 64-bit version of Vista Home Premium and the new ATI driver.

The results where the problem completely went away no more corrupted video and no failures to stop recording at the proper time, it is now working like it should have so there was definitely nothing wrong with the hardware in the first place.

Better late than never I guess at least to any ATI/AMD's folks who read this thread and found the problem & fixed it thanks.

[collinsricki]

Hey,

This is my first venture into the world of tv/Video capture and its not going to well.

I cant seem to find a driver for my capture card, only a bundled "Catalyst" which my system doesnt seem to like.

It tells me that its installing the driver for some other wierd product (USB 2 650 ... blah blah).

Does anyone have any idea where i can find the driver for this decive without all the other annoying bundled package.

If there is anyone else out there that has had problem with this card in conjunction with Vista and can offer insight i would highly appreciate it.

Also setting up the Vista Media Center to use this card, any help there would be great.

ATI rocks, but navigating thier site is a nightmare.

I await insight from you great brain boxes.

Rick