New ATI Tuner Card.

[jonaslasky]

Well, as far as I can tell, the magic is in the product somewhere, but it only can be seen in the preview window. What reaches disk is a pale shadow of what I see in my screen. In fact, what gets captured isn't any better than the cheapo mpeg usb capture toy that my sister bought at walmart for $30.

I am using MMC 9.13 which at least recognizes the card even if it doesnt' let me tap into any of the 550 Pro's specific functionality.

Your only hope is to use a purely software based product to capture the video. Anything that takes advantage of 550's hardware MPEG-2 encoding would give you the same problem.... well that is until ATI decides to let us actually configure it.

My own experience with capturing video with huffyuv compression has been very good actually, but I didn't try capturing anything through the S-VIDEO input. Even DivX or XviD compression is much better than hardware MPEG-2 captures with the 550. I tried iuVCR and virtual VCR, but that was sometime back.. it was hard to synchronize the audio with the video.

Good luck!

[swiego]

Very frustrated at ATI.

Well, I learned Graphedit and determined that the comb filter does work. Over composite, I can see the improvement using the 3D versus the 2D against certain material. In fact composite looks as good if not better than s-vidio from my $450 SVHS, which is very impressive. It really is a top-notch comb filter, not sure if I've ever seen better.

Unfortunately the NR (near as I can tell) seems to be limited to tuner sources. And the vaunted "automatic gain control" is nowhere to be found. This leaves captures looking clean, sure, but as far as I can tell the 550 Pro has zero practical advantages over the Theater 200 chip in the AIW cards.... and in a sense, zero advantages over most of the other capture solutions on the market as well. Basically I think this is mostly hype. My suggestion is for people to write off the HW claims of this device and insert a separate procamp into their capturing chain if you need signal manipulation. I wouldn't suggest this if it weren't for the fact that this card is close to a year old.

Haven't decided whether to return this tomorrow or not, we'll see. Looked at a friend's nVidia solution and though I didn't catch all the details, the hardware encoding *and* decoding capabilities were impressive, and the capture quality was every bit as good. Going to check that out... doesn't seem to make any claims about PQ too, which after this experience I find to be comforting!

[dutchfudge]

Very frustrated at ATI.
Haven't decided whether to return this tomorrow or not, we'll see. Looked at a friend's nVidia solution and though I didn't catch all the details, the hardware encoding *and* decoding capabilities were impressive, and the capture quality was every bit as good. Going to check that out... doesn't seem to make any claims about PQ too, which after this experience I find to be comforting!

Run, don't walk, to get this back to the store. I've seen a couple people say the FusionHDTV5 Gold has analog capture that rivals or beats the 550. You should look elsewhere...before it's too late.

It's too late for me though, could you point me to a good Graph Edit tutorial or something to get me started? I need that 3D filter so I can capture my laserdisc material.

thanks

[ciregnol]

Very frustrated at ATI.

Looked at a friend's nVidia solution and though I didn't catch all the details, the hardware encoding *and* decoding capabilities were impressive, and the capture quality was every bit as good. Going to check that out... doesn't seem to make any claims about PQ too, which after this experience I find to be comforting!

swiego,

Can you let us know your friend's Nvidia setup? Perhaps a year ago (I posted findings in this forum), I personally bought an NVTV capture card, as well as a Hauppauge 150 card and a Sapphire Theatrix. The NVTV was far INFERIOR. I only had it in about 10 minutes because the video quality was not even in the same league as the other two cards. Since I'm satisfied with my two Theater 550 cards in MCE, I haven't been following this thread as closely, nor the TV captuer market, but lately have had a few friends going to MCE and asking me for purchasing advice, and I don't want to steer them wrong if there is something better out now.

[Octavean]

At this point it seems that most people who are having issues either have a specific technical problem or they bought the card for a special project that requires control over the advanced features of the card,….or some such. Software compatibility is also a sore point.

MCE 2K5 users by far seem to be reasonably satisfied with the T550P.

I for one am very happy with both my T550P cards in their respective MCE 2K5 PCs. Image quality is also very, very good. In fact, I can usually tell which tuner I’m using in MCE at any given time with little more then a quick glance but I actually have to take a closer look in order to distinguish between a OTA SD digital broadcast and SD on the T550P.

[johny2k]

Finally there is a new driver version out on ATI website for Theater 550 PRO.

Version 6.14.10.134
Posted: February 9, 2006
File Size: 4 MB
WHQL Certified

http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html

[SHSPVR]

about time but there web page is so overload hehe

[Mace]

about time but there web page is so overload hehe

new catalyst drivers were released today

[duren]

As excited as I am about trying this new driver, I don't know if I should bother. So far it's been nothing but disappointment.

If anyone comes across what this driver is supposed to improve, please post.

I'm interested in bitrate control - since no program can do this properly - not MMC, not ChrisTV, not GBPVR, nothing..

and better quality HW capture - is it just me or do the images looked paletted, like 256 colors sometimes? It's extremely evident if you try to encode the captured mpeg into some other format afterwards. And no, it's not because i've set the bitrate / resolution too low on the encode.

I have to admit it appears to stand out a LOT more, in fact perhaps completely in older footage - an old movie, tv show or especially home video. I captured new stuff from TV and it looked great, although that's considered a different source - are there some magic filters that are getting applied to coax and not composite/s-video?

[duren]

Well I took the plunge, the only noticable difference I see so far is that the tuner is no longer identified as unknown source but rather properly as a theatre 550 pro, although the old one is still in the list.

I tried capturing @ various bitrates using the hardware encoder and an analysis of each file shows the bitrate being the same no matter what profile I chose, hovering at about 5mbps.

What's the deal?

[jonaslasky]

Well I took the plunge, the only noticable difference I see so far is that the tuner is no longer identified as unknown source but rather properly as a theatre 550 pro, although the old one is still in the list.

I tried capturing @ various bitrates using the hardware encoder and an analysis of each file shows the bitrate being the same no matter what profile I chose, hovering at about 5mbps.

What's the deal?

Thanks so much for posting this and your previous post. Your observations are much the same as mine. No matter how much I wish things were different, I'm afraid T550 will only continue to disappoint. I felt early on that ATI was doing some hocus-pocus with their encoding, and their noise reduction system is a bit off.... probably the cause of that awful video when the source is less than pristine. It really is terrible. You can tell something goes terribly wrong because recording the same video in AVI looks much better. Now i know I don't have to bother installing the new driver.

Jonas

[johny2k]

I'm interested in bitrate control - since no program can do this properly - not MMC, not ChrisTV, not GBPVR, nothing..

Doesn't ChrisTV change the video bitrate when recording ? It does for me.
Seems that you might have a problem with some .ax file of ATI driver.
For more info check this post : http://forum.chris-tv.com/index.php?...indpost&p=7465

[thatdude90210]

Looks like the new driver does fix something. Previously, whenever I try to record with both of my Sapphire 550pro cards at the same time using SageTV (both would work in GBpvr, so I thought it was just a Sagetv issue), the second card would not record.

With the latest driver, both cards in my system can record at the same time. And I'm pretty happy with the picture quality output from my x1600pro over dvi to my tv.

If we could tweak the sharpness just a little bit, I would have no complaints left... which is not bad considering I was one of the early complainers who had a few nasty names for Powercinema.

[duren]

Doesn't ChrisTV change the video bitrate when recording ? It does for me.
Seems that you might have a problem with some .ax file of ATI driver.
For more info check this post : http://forum.chris-tv.com/index.php?...indpost&p=7465

I did try ChrisTV again (hadn't since 2-3 driver updates previous) and I can confirm that it does capture at higher bitrates, although it still does not work correctly. For instance, choosing CBR does not matter, and choosing average 9 and peak 15mbps doens't matter because it appears to always hover at 8.5. There should be a peak somewhere at 15 or even atleast 10.

My guess is that ChrisTV is not doing anything better than what PowerCinema could do - if I'm not mistaken, I think it's "Best" profile also captured around 8mbps.

and so, all I want is for MMC to properly set and utilize the bitrate for the card and I'll be happy, because right now the captures are coming out crappy (blocky).

I really hope ATI fixes this in the next driver release / mmc update because this really should be working already.

[swiego]

Well, I returned my 550 Pro. I needed a solution where what I saw in the preview window was exactly the same as what was captured, and the ATI couldn't do that. I am currently researching more professional solutions and definitely could use some advice on a card that offers uncompressed 8, 10 or 12-bit SD capture from at least composite and s-video (component would be nice!) and comes with comprehensive and complete software support.

Learning how to use graphedit and all was nice, but I really don't have time to be tinkering with this card.

I'm very disappointed, I never sensed such poor software support when using my Radeon video cards over the years.

[theatrix]

Hi,

I have missed the chance to return my theatrix 550 pro and will soon be selling it on ebay, but before I do I was wondering if the ati guys on this forum could answer a question for me ? Will there ever be any more control / functionality over the chips noise reduction / 3d filters ? I have spent weeks trying to get this question answered.

And also the same question that swiego asked above - will we ever get the capture to look the same as preview, the filters appear to be disabled in capture mode ?


Thanks