Software with full support for ATI Theater 550 PRO

[johny2k]

Hi,

Searching on google for an alternative software for the Theater 550 PRO card, I came across ChrisTV software : www.chris-tv.com/ati_cards.html

It lets you change any settings in the hardware MPEG encoder and also lets you tweak the image prefilter settings : comb filter, noise filter and volume.

Also I found a guide how to set ChrisTV to work with the 550 PRO, here : http://forum.chris-tv.com/index.php?showtopic=1827

Hope this help someone else too

[jesus_]

It is indeed the only software I know of that allows you to do hardware encoded mpeg recording with full bitrate control.

[jpeshek]

Hopefully someone will post a link to ATI's MMC 9.10, which shipped with X1800 AIW cards but was not made available for download. I have read elsewhere in this forum that MMC 9.10 and above will support the Theater550. I have tried ChrisTV for the 30 day trial and honestly, it does pretty good! But it costs $30, so I'm going to wait and see how MMC does IF and WHEN it becomes available.

[Myrdhinn]

Personally I'd go with GBPVR which is free, works just as good as buggy ChrisTV and saves you moola.

[Octavean]

Originally Posted by jpeshek

Hopefully someone will post a link to ATI's MMC 9.10, which shipped with X1800 AIW cards but was not made available for download. I have read elsewhere in this forum that MMC 9.10 and above will support the Theater550. I have tried ChrisTV for the 30 day trial and honestly, it does pretty good! But it costs $30, so I'm going to wait and see how MMC does IF and WHEN it becomes available.

Recent T550P support in MMC starts at 9.09. Supposedly MMC 9.09 works well with the T550P and is stable.

This post seems to suggest that you might be able to find 9.09 if you are willing to take a trip to the seedy side of the web (eMule):

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showpost...5&postcount=24

Personally I don’t want MMC 9.09/9.10 that badly. In fact I was approached by a user who had MMC 9.09 and wanted to know if I was interested in testing it on one of my T550P cards. I declined in part due to the fact that I don’t have a test system setup for such things, which would mean that I would have to test it on a MCE 2K5 PC. Since MMC 9.04 caused some problems on what was previously an immaculate MCE 2K5 install I didn’t want to take any chances.

[johny2k]

A new version of ChrisTV has been released.

From the changelog of version 4.80 :
- We have improved the support for ATI Theater 550 PRO TV cards.
- Added the option to fix sound quality for some TV cards with MPEG Hardware encoder (like ATI Theater 550 PRO, Hauppauge PVR 150/250/350/500) which might have problems : choppy sound or no sound in preview when "Live Preview Mode" is disabled or while making recordings with low video bitrates.
- Fixed sound mode detection when using Composite or S-Video inputs.
Added the option to improve ChrisTV channel list loading time (works only on some systems).
- Added the option to fix Teletext initialization on WinXP Media Center Edition.

More details on their website : www.chris-tv.com

[Cooper42020]

I tried Snapstream Beyond TV. It was amazing. No specific setting tweaks, but you know how with power cinema for the forst 20-30 seconds the playback is actually a little slow? This changes channels quite quickly and playback speed is 100% immediatley.

Picture was clear and the live updating guide is impecable. I've yet to try the new 4.0 version as my tuner has stopped working in my system and I've tried 2 replacements in the past month and have yet to find a solution.


Cheers!

[johny2k]

ChrisTV version 4.90 is out.

Changelog Version 4.90 ( 9 March 2006 )

• ChrisTV Configuration Wizard has been improved and optimized in order to help you configure ChrisTV easier and faster to work smoothly with your capture device. Just select the appropriate capture device from the list and you'll be ready to enjoy ChrisTV PVR.
• Updated support for ATI Theater 550 PRO latest driver and fixed frame size setting bug for recording mode
• Added support for TV-Browser - TV guide software, so you can add/delete scheduled recordings directly from TV-Browser, for more details about the configuration steps, please check our forum.
• Added Closed Captions feature and improved european teletext support.
• Better video quality for TimeShifting feature and Preview mode when TV Card MPEG Hardware Encoder is used.
• MPEG Hardware Encoder detection has been improved for systems that have more than one TV card with MPEG Hardware Encoder.
• Support for FFDShow has been improved and also you can set which FFDShow filter preset should be applied to the video preview.
• Optimized video and audio initialization on ChrisTV launch.
• Fixed video rendering problems for capture devices that have only video capture pin.

More information here : www.chris-tv.com

[wEvil]

*koff*

Toddling over to demonoid will leave you with a shiny "unreleased" copy of MMC 9.09.

I'm unsure as to the legality of this post so if you need to remove it, please do so.

I'm posting this here in the hopes that it will save the next poor sod who spends his entire evening fighting the utterly boneheaded cyberlink travesty bundled with the card, then GBPVR and finally virtualdub.

I'd never have thought trying to get some old home videos transferred off their rapidly deteriorating casettes would have been so much bother.

So for what I wanted to do here's my experience;

Cyberlink Powercinema - Complete, and utter s**t

GBPVR - A very strong effort but it's still a little clunky. Considering it's only one guy though...

Virtualdub - won't support the hardware mpeg2 encoding features on the 550 so what's the point?


I'm going to try out the MMC and see what luck I have, then post back here. I hope someone from ATI is listening and drops cyberlink though *shivers*

[jesus_]

Try ChrisTV, it's a little buggy sometimes (but works like a charm most of the time) but it supports hardware mpeg2 encoding (with full control!) and does everything a tv-app should do. I use it to transfer VHS to DVD.

[nj2112]

GBPVR is the way to go for a 550.

xmltv EPG support, bitrate control, multi card support. Everything you would expect from a PVR app.

Support for community developed plugins.

And it's free.

[johny2k]

I've tested ChrisTWEAk latest version and works fine with the ATI 550 PRO, more info you can find on www.chris-pc.com/tweak