digitalFAQ.com Forums [Archives] - Recording Video with ATI ALL IN WONDER 8500DV 64MB

Quote:

Originally Posted by password

does any body got any tips i can use for this hardware? thanx

Don't use the software that came with it, it's not very flexible and when capturing drops frames. However, it's the only software I know of that captures MPEG-2 (but even then it sometimes drops frames). Plus you get that nifty transparent overlay feature (in other words, it's great for watching TV, but for captures use something else).

Get something like ATV2000 for captures, and a codec like HuffYUV (provided you have a big hard drive, it takes up quite a bit of space but is lossless). Alternatively, get an MJPEG codec but use high quality (otherwise you'll end up with a lot of mosquito noise).

If your sound card is C-Media based (many onboard ones are), you might have problems with the audio portion of your captures. If the sound is fuzzy and fairly quiet you'll know... as far as I know, the only solution is to replace the sound card (I was lucky enough to find a Hercules Fortissimo III on sale). (Technically it's cause the All-in-Wonder wants the card in full-duplex mode, but the C-Media card doesn't quite support it so it sounds like an old 8-bit capture. No one wanted to fix their drivers about a year ago when I noticed this, but it may have changed since then.)

I've only used the firewire ports once, to capture DV from a Canon ZR40 video camera. Windows XP discovered the camera without me doing anything, and I got a flawless capture using DVIO. I had to install the Panasonic DV codec to read the files, but after that they worked fine in AviSynth (both video and audio).

As far as the Radeon portion goes, it will support Doom 3 when that comes out later in the year :-)

Linux/BSD users might want to know that the card works fine for 2D graphics in those operating systems, but I haven't got it to work for 3D yet. XFree86 4.3 claims to support 3D on the 8500 cards, so maybe I forgot to uncomment the GLX option in XF86Config...

I haven't even tried getting a video capture working in Linux yet, but the GATOS Project might be useful for this (also includes drivers for the Remote Wonder). The firewire port appears to be detected in Linux (not quite in FreeBSD yet) but again I haven't tested it...