Sciascia: Your final opinion of the 8500DV?

[KRSESQ]

So, what's the scoop? a good replacement for a G200? How's the latest driver revision? Compatable with Premiere6? MSP6? Capture and output picture quality?

Enquiring minds want to know!

Kevin

[Sciascia]

Sorry I haven't posted any news lately but I have been busy with golf. Priorities change dramatically with the weather.

Anyway the final conclusion is not final because ATI just released new display drivers, WDM capture drivers and a new MMC version all last night. I do know that the new MMC enables 48kHz audio and supposedly hs a SVCD profile that is actually right. They also fixed some memory leak that I never experienced anyway. Bottom line is that if I have some time this weekend I may get around to installing it. The way the weather looks, it probably won't happen.

Editing with MPEG2 video is not very good in any SW package. Womble seems to be the best editor since it does not render everything, but MSP6 and Premiere are not the best MPEG2 editors. AVI files work great in both packages, especially the popular Picvideo MJPEG codec. Same as with the Marvel.

The firewire port works great with the right MB and 3D is really impressive. DVD playback is pretty nice as wel and the theater mode finally has the right aspect ratio for DVD's. This is all witht he older SW/drivers so I do not know what to expect with the new stuff. Supposedly there are some marked improvements.

I like it a lot, it may not be the last ATI product I buy. The driver support has become on the edge of ridiculous. I can't keep upi with teh number of releases. In about 4 months there have been atleast 5 different official releases with leaked and unofficial thrown in there. This is the 3rd set of capture SW as well. Nice change from waiting for a year to find out that you aren't getting any new drivers.

If I had it to do over again I would get the AIW Radeon 8500 128M instead of the 8500DV. The firewire is very picky about MB's and the 128 has a better tuner and is clocked faster.

Forgot, capture quality. From the tuner it looks great especially the MPEG2. It looks incredible. I never imagined realtime MPEG2 could look so good. AVI is the same, but he Marvel did a fine job with MJPEG too, though I think the tuner in the ATI is better.

They also just released a dongle for component video, don't know much about it yet....

[KRSESQ]

I was curious about analog capture, but I'm sure you've moved on to bigger and better things...

I presume it's safe to assume that the DV handles and outputs all codecs well enough, no proprietary BS like Zoran to cope with?

Kevin

[Sciascia]

Not being a big DV user all I can say is that it does capture fine using WinXP Movie maker and I guess that it was using the MS DV codec. I set it for 30fpos DV highest setting and it seemed to owrk fine. I was borowing a DV cam to do it and he needed it back before I could really delve into it. There was no SW to install the firewire, it is standard 1394 port so that may give you a clue.

[Fred H]

What do you think about the Radeon 7500?
It's ceaper, no fireware, BUT for analog users...?

Fred H