I'm not 100% done just yet, but I'm pretty excited about this. For those who may be wondering where I disappeared to for the past week, I've been sitting on the floor almost every day experimenting with hardware. One of those projects was to test ATI All In Wonder 9000-series cards under Windows Vista 32-bit and Xubuntu Linux 32-bit.
As of 5 minutes ago, I have 352x480 MPEG-2 test captures from ATI MMC, as installed on Vista Home Basic 32-bit.
Assuming everything passes an audit, I'll be making a step-by-step Vista install and usage guide!
Side Note: That set of ATI 600 USB card guides is coming too ... (1) Installation, (2) MPEG for NTSC, (3) AVI for NTSC, (4) AVI for PAL
Exciting stuff.
----- Update 1 ------
The audit half passed, half failed.
Capturing
Huffyuv with
VirtualDub 1.9 works perfectly.
Capturing in ATI MMC is an issue due to how Windows Vista is interacting with the sound card. The onboard C-Media sound card fails, as no audio input ports are detected. A Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card fails to interact with ATI MMC -- even with the Chinese modified Vista/7 drivers -- but works fine with
VirtualDub. ATI MMC crashes, and a generic technobabble message is issued by Windows; it has something to do with MFC42.dll. My earlier tests were performed before I had installed sound card drivers. Video-only capturing is possible if a sound card is not installed. I don't yet know if it's an issue with these sound cards, or all sound cards. (I have a feeling it's the latter.)
Right now I'm testing it for dropped frames and lip sync (audio lock/sync). Out of 57,000+ frames captured, it dropped 11 frames (duplicated), almost all of which happened in the first minute or two of capturing (which is common).
----- Update 2 ------
Audio sync/quality passed my audit, as did frame dropping.
Attached is the YMPEG MPEG-2 output from a
Huffyuv AVI capture made with an ATI All In Wonder 9200 card in Windows Vista Home Basic 32-bit. I also have Matrox MPEG codecs installed. While the CPU is nowhere near adequate for live MPEG-2 capturing via VirtualDub, the MPEG-2 export options works perfectly -- or use something else, if you want, be it
Avidemux or MainConcept Reference.
My next step is to pull the hard drive, and see if I can repeat the process in Windows 7. It's unlikely, due to change made in Windows 7 from Vista, but still worth attempting since I now have the method down. I'll also give a cursory attempt at installing the card in Xubuntu, using Video4Linux (V4L) and the gatos drivers. Should the 9200 card fail, I have a PCI 7200 card that can be quickly attempted in its place. I actually expect the Linux attempt to fail, too, but that's what I thought of Vista. So we'll see what happens.
None of this is overly difficult, if you're familiar with manually overriding the Windows driver model. I can't believe nobody has attempted this before -- and even I'm guilty of this. It seems everybody has just taken MS and AMD/ATI at face value on the statement that "it won't work" -- but it's absolute hogwash. It works fine if you're at all skilled as a Windows administrator.
----- Update 3 ------
ATI MMC 8.8 now works.
And I poured myself a special drink to celebrate.
For almost 5 hours tonight, Site Staff member JMP and myself bounced ideas back and forth over how to make ATI MMC cooperate with the audio drivers. The biggest issue with Windows Vista is how splintered audio controls are, as compared to XP, and how uncooperative the audio was with ATI MMC. What finally worked was my idea to think back to the days of hacking the 128 Pro and the earliest issues we had with Windows 2000 migrating to XP -- meaning registry hacks. Though manual registry adjustments, ATI MMC can be forced to cooperate.
So now everything works: (1) ATI MMC for MPEG-2 capturing, and (2) VirtualDub for Huffyuv AVI capturing.
This is a game changer for ATI users. We can continue to use newer OS, without losing our hardware in the process. I've only tested this with 32-bit, and I'd be surprised if it worked under 64-bit. There's also a chance this is going to work in Windows 7 x86, but I'll need to test further.
... and I have another special celebratory brew in the fridge, in case the Win7 tests work.
Given this, I'm going to look at making some massive hardware upgrades to one of my 9600-based capturing systems, in order to make it a hybrid capture/editing system. Also hoping that this hacking can be recreated as perfectly. The testing system has already been sold to a lucky member on this site.
The 4th and final update will be links to a formal install/hacking guide on the main site.
