Announcement

**JJHamster** · 4 October 2001, 05:19

If you are in a PAL area forget the 450eTV - it suffers from jumpy/jerky play back on TV out. Matrox say this will be cured with new drivers - but I would wait and see - they have been promising them for many months and ,given the length of time, I suspect there is a major problem.

**HellSpawn** · 4 October 2001, 09:26

I'm in Canada, and we use NTSC here. Does the G450 eTV have any problems with NTSC tv out? I've read up some more on it, and apparently the card cannot do overlay using the the TV out. It's fullscreen only. Sounds like that will be a problem since I'm only going to be using a TV for the display, no monitor will be attached. So apparently I wont be able to see the menu's, etc. Can anyone shed more light on this?

How does the tvout and capture quality of the eTV compare with the Radeon AIW?

**Indiana** · 4 October 2001, 11:11

The G450 is in fact no good solution for a TV-Only system. It can't display any overlays on the TV in clone mode- which is the mode you'd have to use when having a TV-Only system. You have the choice between having a copy of your primary on the TV but with a black/purple area where the overlay should be played or just seeing your overlay fullscreen and having to control your computer without seeing anything...
And this "is the way it's supposed to work" (according to Matrox tech support

) when everyone expects otherwise from a card with TVOut since there's NO OTHER card out there with this "feature", err... limitation....

It works wonderful with the Radeon VIVO (and to my knowledge will also with the AIW). The TVOut of the ATI is very good, while the G400 has excellent TVOut.
The G450 is said to have worse TVOut quality than the G400, so I guess the cards should be on par. The Radeon will maybe have the better "readability" and the better DVD playback, but you'll only get real Overscan TVOut without any borders with the G400/450...

...the neverending story... - the card that has all features, ATIs DVD and features, Matrox' display-quality, NVidivas speed (should I say ATIs speed soon?) and especially NVidias drivers is just not available

**JTA** · 4 October 2001, 12:39

I'd also like to add the following :

I've just bougt an G450-eTV, not for its TV-tuner, but you can read that story in another thread here. It's installed and I even got it to work, but I can't say much for the quality of the TV signals I'm receiving !

the G450 is hooked to cable-tv (btw, I'm writing from Belgium, Europe, so we're talking PAL). During installation, an automatic scan of all tv-channels is executed. This scan halted on error after finding it's 5th channel. I had no other choice but to accept the default list.

Many of the channels give bad image : snow & interference. There is NO WAY to manually adjust the channel settings. You CAN manually add new channels yourself, starting an automated scan from a given frequency, but this rarely solves the problem : the scan halts on exactly the same frequency and displays the same snow & interference as before.

In all : the TV reception quality of this card is open for improvement (to say the least) !

**Indiana** · 4 October 2001, 12:55

JTA, I don't know about the quality of the G450's tuner (so maybe it really sucks), but I DO know that you should be able to capture with PICVideos software MJPEG compression codec with anything >= Duron800 (at least I didn't have ANY problems with my Duron800 and software MJPEG), so I can only partially understand your complaints in your other thread.

Remember that the ATI does it's MPEG cpaturing in software, not hardware, too. And I'm in no way using ATIs capture software with my VIVO since it's crappy. But using VirtualDub, I get very convenient results.

**nut** · 5 October 2001, 07:50

I bought both cards. The ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon has a great TV Out if you are using it for your main display. I wanted to be able to use my monitor to do other things which video was playing on the TV. Also the All-In-Wonder DOES NOT SUPPORT multiple resolutions. So if you run a monitor @ 1024 x 768 and want to run a TV OUT at the same time, it will take the lowest res for both (800 x 600). I returned it mostly becasue of conflicts with my AMD / ASUS / VIA System.

The G450 eTV i'm having problems with a sound and Video quality.
It seems that I have a black line at the bottom of the video. I have called tech support, matrox forum, and here now try this matroxuser forum. Beside the above problems I like the card. It support multiple res and diplays DVD with out having them on the monitor screen.

**wkulecz** · 5 October 2001, 09:14

If you want a TiVo buy a Tivo.

Cheaper in both time and money that turning a PC into a poor clone of one.

--wally.

**HellSpawn** · 5 October 2001, 09:36

I was originally going to buy a Tivo, but they're not available in Canada. Using a PC will give me more versitality as well, considering you can't archive recordings from a Tivo. I'm also planning on using it as an MP3 player, since it will be hooked up to my home stereo anyways.

**Dr Mordrid** · 5 October 2001, 11:15

I do believe independent resolutions are available if you install the eDualHead addon, even in Win2K.

Dr. Mordrid

**JTA** · 5 October 2001, 11:59

Hello Indiana,

about the G450 tv-tuner : yes, it's bad. I'm not saying this because I feel mislead by Matrox because I didn't really get what I thought I would get, but because of what I see here on my screen : half of all the channels have snow or interference.

About my video capturing problem : I solved this by removing the Rainbow Runner codec that was installed together with the card's drivers and software. Apparently, this driver caused some conflict, or whatever, but I can now capture full-screen PAL using the Pegasus MJPEG software compressor. The processor load varies between 10 and 50%, and the data stream is about 8MByte/sec.

Hello, DrMordrid -
what's the eDualhead addon - what does it do and where can I get it ? I just checked the Matrox drivers area, and I do not seem to find anything ?

**JJHamster** · 5 October 2001, 12:48

Nut,

What problems did you have? I am trying to RMA my 450eTV due to the PAL problem. I was thinking of an AIW but I also have a AMD / ASUS / VIA System.
Thanks

JJ

**nut** · 9 October 2001, 10:28

When the card would go into sleep mode, afterwards when I would shut down my machine, I got the blue screen of death.
They said is was my monitor causing the problem, but I tried a totally different monitor. I think it has something to do with the VIA KT133 Chipset. Tried to install a patch to new software, it would not install over my software that came with the card.

The only other reason I sent the card back, was that I didn't like how when you activited the tv-out your monitor screen res went to 800 x 600 Pan mode (meaning the the desktop is at 1024x768 but monitor is at 800x600). Also after I sent the card back I notice the only movie I recorded stopped at the 4 GB Limit and did not span over several files.

And yes it is true that the eDualhead on the G450 is not multiple res compatible with Win2K but it is in Win98. They say that the G550 is multiple res compatible in Win2K.

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G450 eTV?

G450 eTV?

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