Okay, I did throw the ATI 9200 All-In-Wonder card into my XPSP1a system, and XPSP2 system.
The Driver + MMC 8.8 disc that came with the card 180-V01084-100 has a "special" order of installation dependency.
You can "make it work" in many ways after its crashed and burned, but doing that produces disappointing capture quality in the image. The image is not stable and wavers, it looks like a hardware signal issue, its not, however I think its a software "blob" issue that occurs if the drivers are "cobbled" together.
The "install order" is very important.
The disc 180-V01084-100 [only] installs on XP-SP1 correctly.
The disc 180-V01084 [will appear] to install correctly on XP-SP2, but it installs "barely" compatible older device drivers with the [
new] XP kernel from SP2. ATI Tests (will) "pass" however TV setup will fail and offer to run the tests again.
You can get
VirtualDub to work on XP-SP2 even if ATI TV (or the MMC) apps fail, but the signal quality will be highly degraded and unstable. Software "blob" are small bits of code uploaded to cards to basically "set them up" for use, to optimal readiness to process signals, without them the cards are not completely setup, or optimized.. they are half-a sleep and don't process the signals in an optimal manner. They are usually highly proprietary and a closely guarded product secret. They aren't exactly device drivers and improperly setup driver installs can loose them.. effecting card performance.
A work-around if you can't start again from XP-SP1, and have to continue on with XP-SP2, is to go into Device Manager, find the Display drivers and pull up their Property pages and select [Rollback].. the disc installed [old] drivers when it successfully completed. XP-SP2 changed the Kernel and has newer better ATI device drivers which are rock solid and crystal clear. There are two sets of ATI device drivers which ATI released to Microsoft to bundle with the new SP2 kernel and are included in the Service Pack 2 install.
After "rollback" of the Display drivers, you have to reboot. Then do the same thing for the ATI WDM device drivers under [Sound, Video and game controllers]. All of them..
(set 1)
Display adapters
+-ALL-IN-WONDER 9200
+-ALL-IN-WONDER 9200 - Secondary
(set 2)
Sound, video and game controllers
+- ATI WDM Rage Theater Audio
+- ATI WDM Rage Theater Video
+- ATI WDM Specialized MVD Codec
+- ATI WDM Specialized PCD Codec
+- ATI WDM TV Audio Crossbar
+- ATI WDM TV Tuner
You cannot roll back (set 2) until the Display drivers (set 1) have been rolled back and the system has been rebooted.
If you keep track of the date and versions you will see that [all] of the device drivers installed by the disc are old and walk over the SP2 device drivers. By "rolling back" you are actually (undoing) what the disc did and restoring the newer SP2 device drivers. Once this is done, clicking on the TV app will begin normal setup because the newer device drivers are "fully" compatible with the XPSP2 Kernel.
But..
The signal will (not) be as clear and stable as it would be if you started from XP-SP1, installed the ATI disc with those device drivers, then installed SP2.. this is superior to working-around the problem. I suspect some part is not restored with the "rollback" which cleans up "more" of the signal than if all of the device drivers were installed correctly the first time through.. from XP-SP1 to disc to XP-SP2
The device driver + MMC disc [ 180-V01084-100 ] has an installer called the "Catalyst" which installs device drivers, common dependencies for the MMC and then installs the MMC 8.8
Shortly after starting it offers install everything [Express Settings] or install only selected things [Custom Settings]. But the device drivers are "mandatory" .. you cannot [deselect] them and install only the MMC 8.8 .. so its an all or nothing bargain. If you want to install MMC 8.8 you must install the version of device drivers included on the disc, and they are not compatible "Fully" with the XP after Service Pack 2 has been applied. Your ("
best") option is to start with a system that has XP but only Service Pack 1 applied, then install the ATI disc device drivers (which are older but "Fully" compatible with XP Service Pack 1 ) then you "can" set up ATI TV, it does not complain. And only then install XP Service Pack 2, this will update the device drivers "Fully" and be compatible with XP with Service Pack 2
It sounds tortuous, but the picture quality and capture signal stability are very apparent. You can tell when the device drivers are wrong in
VirtualDub, and when the rollback method has been used. Its "very" noticeable. The correct order makes a very good picture.
Once you have the system in a crystal clear, locked state. Make a good full system backup and keep it handy should you need to restore to that known state.
I did hook up a PAL_B source and captured with the 9200 with no problem. But I see people were speaking of the Elite or 550 not supporting PAL_N.
The 9200 like all of the 9000 series cards had the Theater 200 chip, while the Elite or 550 has the Theater 550 pro chip. They were designed and made by different companies.
The Theater 200 was designed and made by ATI technologies.
The Theater 550 chip was acquired from outside ATI after an acquisition and released after ATI was acquired by AMD.
The 550 chip was targeted as the AMD Tivo killer for cable and satellite boxes as a PVR on a chip. It included full hardware MPEG2 encoding on chip and did not have the flexibility of the 200 chip.
Optional AGC by-pass was removed and many functions were defaulted and optimized for time shifting.
Since it was primarily targeting the US Home market, its not surprising that it may not support all PAL variations. ATI had a lot of International sales experience. AMD was new to the graphics market and focused mostly on the US market.
-- Bonus
If you have the Turtle Beach, Santa Cruz sound card. You can use the systray Santa Cruz "mixer" to [enable] audio playback for the Line Input.. (un-mute it) and that [
will not ] cause latency issues while performing video and audio capture in VirtualDub. To be clear, [
Do Not Enable "Audio Playback"] in the VirtualDub Audio (menu).
This particular sound card has an [onboard] hardware mixer which will route captured audio direct to its audio out connector on the back of the card and not add any additional load to the system performing the video capture.
This is definitely not an option on cheaper sound cards. But its a welcome feature with the Santa Cruz sound card.