Poor Matrox

[tiqq]

I have a G400 MAX and a RRG.
After one year of W2K and half a year of beta driver I am realy angry with Matrox.

Why can´t they build working drivers ?

All I have is hightech garbage - no serious work can be done with this combination. And problems over problems...

But be sure - this was the last product I bought from Matrox.

TIQQ

[Greebe]

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[Elie]

What..... Is Win98SE no longer good anymore??

If you were really serious about your "work" you would've created a dual boot system, Win98 and Win2K.

[coolfish]

tiqq we all know matrox is a sad, pathetic excuse of a company.

And Elie... in terms of reliability (crashes and whatnot), compared to Win2k, Win98SE is no longer any good. Plus some of us have dual processor systems, where Win98 is definately crap compared to Win2k for obvious reasons.

[hapz]

If I'd know how, I'd organize an "open letter" to the CEO of Matrox. I doubt that he is aware of the grave situation regarding driver support, especially for Win2k. Too many underlings telling him how good they are, and that everthing is under control, etc., when in reality it stinks. Everything is blocked off, everybody just gets a canned response. Disgusting.

If the CEO is aware and still nothing or not enough is done, and that includes informing their customers, than Matrox deserves being put on public display.

------------------
Harald

[tiqq]

Well, I don´t want to discuss the advantages of serveral OS´s. Just take it as a fact - W2K is the OS of my choise.
And I don´t want to be limitated by the hardware manufactors. After one year of availability of W2K they should have working and stable drivers !
But the W2K drivers are lousy.
And yesterday was the day where all my sadness came out. I took my old TNT board (TV-IN/OUT), connected it to a VCR, and everything worked yust fine. Ok, the quality could be better - but this is now a stable system.

[Elie]

Coolfish & Harald

The OS is just as good as the drivers you install, I don't care if it's Win2K, NT 4.0 or Win98.
Matrox never said anything about Win2K support on the BOX or the web, so ALL who bought the RRG/Marvels should've been well aware of the fact that it only supported Win95/Win98 "officially" .
Fine so Matrox tries to develope Win2K drivers for the RR's, and everybody should appreciate their efforts for that. It doesn't always happen in a snap, it takes time, Win2K is not an easy OS to develope drivers for, I personally don't care if it takes a a day or a year, I'm using Win98 in the mean time and I'm able to capture, edit and export without problems, at least I'm getting some work done

Conclusion..
If anyone bought the RR with the assumption that it'll work under Win2K, is most definately his or her fault, not Matrox's.

I maybe a bit harsh, but it's the truth

Regards,
Elie

[farid]

Elie,

My questions to Matrox would be :

- How much does it cost to develop and maintain a driver for a specific card ?

- If you don't to plan making new drivers because you want to sell new cards, what about making the code open source ? After all, your customers paid for the code development as well, no ?

The general idea being that users could raise enough cash to pay for their own drivers by hiring driver-makers or fiddle with the code themselves (you never know, it worked for Linus !).

Farid

[Dr Mordrid]

As Elie said writing analog capture drivers for Win2K is not exactly easy. There are several reasons internal to Win2K for this, not the least of which is the horrid state of the WDM driver situation.

Microsoft is hammering everyone to not write Video for Windows drivers for their cards while at the same time providing a slow, buggy and incomplete WDM multimedia interface in Win2K. Some smaller companies are ignoring this and writing VfW drivers to tide them over, but the larger ones cannot or they lose their Microsoft compatable status.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Hopefully a lot of this will be sorted out with Service Pack 2, but I'm not holding my breath. Why? Because apparently the beta versions of Whistler, an even newer OS, have the same multimedia issues as Win2K with no solution in site. Wonderful....

It almost makes you wonder if they are purposefully doing this to push everyone to DV instead of analog.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 20 January 2001).]

[This_Idiot]

Tiqq,

This point has been debated at length on this forum for a LONG time (Coolfish, you know this, you aren't a newbie). The Marvels were all designed and developed WAY before any details of W2K were released and no account of this OS was taken in their design. While we can continue to push Matrox to develop W2K drivers for the Marvels, the task is obviously a large one and Matrox still has to provide support for it's core business and new products.

BTW, Matrox is by no means alone in not having current W2K drivers for vidcap !

[Anatoly Neverov]

Being Matrox I would do the same. Let Microsoft first make a normal reliable OS. Windows Y2K is still full of bugs. How to write anything for this system if it will be upgraded and re-done many times? Anybody may call this 'progress', but in reality it is a stupid hurry-scurry.

------------------
Anatoly Neverov
Minsk, Belarus

[gibverse]

I've been on this forum since we were clamoring for NT 4 drivers. I know it can be trying.

If the NT 4 drivers can be used as a model, expect a final 2K driver this quarter. Logic: BETA 1 for NT 4 released April 99, final driver Feb 00. Therefore April 2000 2K driver beta + 10 months would be late Feb early March this year. However, we haven’t seen Beta 2 for 2k yet. The NT 4 beta’s were 2 months apart. 9 months later we still don’t have a second beta. If the second beta was to come out next week, and we then figure similar proportion of time between beta 2 and final, we’re looking at the final driver in 2004. Great.

However, I keep having the pesky feeling that Matrox has dropped all Marvel/RRG driver work to concentrate on the RT-2000 Win2K driver. They obviously have much more riding on this, but it does burn me a little.

John

[wkulecz]

If w2k drivers are so damn hard to write how can a little company like Hauppauge provide good ones for a cheapo $50 card!

They seemed to have figured out the VfW/WDM emulation layer without crying about big bad Microsoft.

--wally.

[GinoCyber]

Because it's just a tv tuner card with standard rgb capture.

Writing drivers for rgb capture doesn't take long and neither does it take long to port over their GUI to win2k.

What takes long is writing drivers for a new OS in a new API for a hardware codec.

Then again, they could have just put this on hold until the etv comes out.

Ciao

[Dr Mordrid]

This is the latest info from the Hauppage WinTV support FAQ and Windows2000 installation instruction pages:

==============================

Instructions for running WinTV under WindowsNT/Windows2000

To run WinTV on your WindowsNT 4.0 or Windows2000 system, you need to:

Download and install the WinTV Video Capture Driver for WindowsNT. This driver supports the WinTV applications, plus any pplications that require a Video for Windows capture driver.

Download and install the WinTV applications.
These include the WinTV32, WinTV-snapshot and WinTV-radio applications.

==============================

Hmmmmm....

Sounds to me like Hauppage is using their old (dated 1999) WindowsNT4 Video for Windows NT4 drivers for the WinTV under Windows2000, not WDM specific drivers at all. Here's why:

==============================

WDM OVERLAY mode drivers V.S. VFW Standard Mode drivers:

The WDM driver should only be used if Microsoft's WEBTV program is going to be used. When installing the WDM drivers for WebTV, you will be prompted to insert your WINDOWS 98 CD ROM. Be sure to have this CD ready, as WebTV will require files from the Windows 98 CD to complete the installation.

If WEBTV is not desired, use the VFW drivers. WDM currently does not support Video capture/conferencing, so with the overlay drivers loaded, these features will not function. Only the WINTV 32 and Radio 32 (if applicable) will function with the WDM drivers installed.

==============================

I guess they also have problems with WDM support. Add them to the list....

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 20 January 2001).]