Any new info on Win2K vidtools?

[AVATAR-X]

Now that Service Pack 1 is out, is Matrox planning on releasing working VT's? Not to sound obnoxious, but it has been 6 months since the release of Win2k and 4 since the beta VT's (which were less than usefull for me)?

[coolfish]

Hear hear.

Note that since the release of their RT1200, they've been supporting that much more with service packs and whatnot. I guess they think the small time consumer doesn't deserve that kind of support. I'll give them one more month to get their gear together and have support for the RRG in win2k like it does in win98 or I'll sell this puppy and get something that has some support. Anyone know of a video capture card that has good win2k drivers, MPG encoding onboard or YUY2 fully supported? Any recommendations?

coolfish

[wkulecz]

coolfish,

Agree with Walrus. The Hauppauge Win/TV series seems to be the best analog cards for w2k at the moment and they are cheap! I've used it with the following video cards without problems under w2k G200 Millenium, TNT2, Voodoo3, and ATI Xpert98. Only problem I see is if you are NTSC there is no 352x240 capture size option or custom size in the setup dialog :-(

The other negative is it needs its own PCI slot.


I can verify that the ATI AIW Pro has worse support than what we are getting from Matrox. It has drivers included on the w2k OEM CDROM, but no apps. AVI_IO version D3.01 does capture with it. MSPro6 Video Capture crashes when I try WDM analog captures of any kind, although firewire thru the Pyro captures fine on the same system :-(

So far, given all the hype about how windows 2000 was gonna fix all the video for windows problems, the only game in town, at present, seems to be MSPro6 with the two DV patches and a Pyro or other OHCI firewire card. The 2/4 GB limit does seem to be gone with these two patches, but the quality of the MS DV codec keeps it from being really useful.

Spending another $50 for the Main Concept DV codec might get you there :-(

--wally.

[IM_Riktar]

I am wondering if Matrox will be releasing drivers for Windows ME.

[RoGuE]

The current Marvel/RR-G Powerdesk and Video Tools for Windows 98 work just fine under Windows Millennium.

[Walrus]

wkulecz: You can capture directly to 352 x 240. Both AVI_IO and VirtualDub allow you to bypass the default capturing sizes and both allow 352x240 with WinTVs under W2K.
As for the Win2K "miracle", if I could get my hardware working usefully under ANYTHING else I would. I've had SO many blue screens under this piece of junk, that Win98 is starting to look stable. (right now I'm at a record-breaking 1.5 days of uptime under W2K... my best amount in months)

[wkulecz]

Walrus,

I haven't tried the "custom" capture settings in AVI_IO on the VfW Hauppauge with w2k, but on the AIW Pro WDM capture it crashes with anything other than the "standard" sizes. Markus is looking into it, I need to repeat some tests to give him more to work with.

Do you have an ACPI BIOS on your motherboard?
Check device manager->computer->properties it should be either MPC or ACPI.

For me ACPI has been headache city. MPC was almost flawless. Apparently there is no way to "switch" short of a re-format and re-install. If somehow your BIOS has switched modes (some have a disable ACPI feature) I'm afraid you'r hosed. I was when a warranty replacement lacked the disable ACPI feature :-(

--wally.

[AVATAR-X]

So far my only problems with Win2K are Matrox and the Marvel G200. Every other piece of hardware and software works perfectly, and I haven't had a single blue screen (except for trying to capture with the Beta VidTools).

That is the reason I'm so anxious to get working VT's, so I can finally nuke '98 off of my computer.

Oh, and the only reason I ever have to restart my Win2k system is so that I can actually use my VidCap.

[Walrus]

wkulecz:
352x240 captures work perfectly under W2K with the WinTV. (just tested a shortish capture with HuffYUV, and it worked without a hitch)
As for my system, ACPI is always disabled. And to be fair to W2K, it's worked without a hitch on my Thinkpad, but on my main system it's been a nightmare. Without fail at some random point it becomes corrupted so that it blue screens just after the W2K start screen and immediatly reboots. There's no way to recover from it. (I'm now working on backing up my W2K partition so I can restore to working configs) If it weren't for that, I would have nearly everything up in W2K. (my sound card's digital in/out functions don't work under W2K)

[Walrus]

Coolfish: The Hauppauge WinTV models all work quite well under W2K. About a week and a half ago I gave up on Matrox and picked up the $100 Stereo/FM model. The nice bonus is that it has a remote control that can be easily hacked to control any program. (I have it setup for WinAMP) The card only supports up to 640x480, but has YUY2 support on everything, and works quite well and is far less finicky than the Marvel. The only other minuses is that it does not have hardware assisted capture codecs (not a problem if your system is 500mhz+), nor does it deinterlace the image when viewing TV on it (then again, if Matrox ever gets it's act together, I still have, and still have installed my Marvel G200) and the tv window will not stretch to sizes greater than 640x480 (though it does have a full screen mode that switches resolutions so it fills out the screen quite nicely) Otherwise, it has FM tuning, cable in, and S-Video in (there's an included adapter to handle composite signals) There's a cheaper WinTV-Go for $50 that only has composite input, no remote, no FM tuning, and only a mono tv tuner (you can still plug in stereo sources to your sound card's line in jack) In general, I like this card better for capturing, but not as much for TV watching.

[wkulecz]

Walrus,

Ah, the Hauppauge is VfW capture drivers, so I'm not surprised it works. My problems are with the built in, and presumably blessed by Microsoft, ATI AIW-Pro WDM capture.

What chipset is your problem w2k system? Next time you reformat/reinstall try enabling ACPI beforehand (make sure you have the latest BIOS). Some systems work better with ACPI, but my experience so far is to try without it first, if possible. The differneces between MPC and ACPI installs are almost enough to consider it as two differnet opererating systems at the lowest levels.

When w2k works its a great improvement over win9x and I almost feel Plug and Play is actually helping make my life easier. When it screws up, its a whole lot worse! My problems came from an unintensional "upgrade" from MPC to ACPI with a warranty motherboard replacement.

After a complete re-format and reinstall things have gone well except for two issuses. The WDM ATI capture problems with AVI_IO and MSPro6 I've mentioned. The other is my IDE DVDROM (master on seconday) was setup PIO4 while the primary master hard drive got setup UDMA by the installer. This is suboptimal but it *should* work. Problem was some transfers from the DVDROM were getting silently corrupted leading me to think the system was "unstable" Once I set the DVDROM to UDMA and rebooted. Reinstalling the problem apps was uneventfull. When I moved the DVDROM to secondary slave and added a second IDE drive as master, the same thing happend -- PIO4 on the DVDROM, UDMA on both drives. I set the DVDROM to UDMA and rebooted before using it and so far so good.

I don't know how widespread these quirks are but, I have an ASUS P2B-D with Intel BX chipset so its pretty maistream and not "bleeding edge".

AVATAR_X,
I'm with you, I'd love working videotools and drivers for the G200 Marvel as well so I could kiss win9x and its lame 2/4GB file limts goodbye!

I've left my Marvel in a strictly win98 box for when I need analog captures for editing to output on tape, other than that, its pretty useless right now.

I had an ISA dual enhanced parallel port card that worked fine in MPC motherboard, but upon the switch neither port could be made to work :-( fortunately, a pair of $25 USB to Parallel Printer adaptors have solved the problem. It looks like ACPI kills non-PnP legacy hardware, although my ISA PnP SB16 has worked perfectly with the ACPI install, I had to "force" it along with the parallel ports with MPC. I'm not 100% sure what is going on here

--wally.

[Walrus]

wkulecz: I'm running on an (&(*$&#*(! Abit BP6 (dual processor BX chipset). Frankly, I have no need for ACPI right now and I have no desire to reload W2K again, and I think I may have a solution to W2K problems. Namely I backed up fully my root dir, winnt and documents and settings directories (including hidden and system files) to a zip file. (under 400 megs) The next time it fails to boot, I'll boot into Win98 and unzip the file replacing the registry, the drivers, and everything else. If that doesn't work, then either Microsoft is putting something critical in program files or my problem really is hardware based. (though I have a feeling this should fix the problem should it happen again)
And problems like your parallel ports issue that makes me very wary of trying ACPI this year. (though I have cleared my system of ISA cards finally!)

[wkulecz]

Walrus,

I too have no use for ACPI, but I was simply passing on info I've gleened from other sources, namely that MPC install seems safer if you have a choice, but there are some reports of MPC installs being troublesome and re-installing to ACPI resolves the problem. Go figure.

Have you installed to FAT32? I'm not sure all of w2k's "protection" features can work when installed to fat32.

Good luck! and here's to solid Marvel w2k drivers and video tools someday.

--wally.