ATI AIW 9200 suddenly poor input?
 

I recently purchased an ATI AIW 9200 AGP and installed it into my XP machine.
Everything was working fine for the first week.
I foolishly disconnected the purple breakout box to untangle its cable whilst the PC was still running and now I get a poor quality scrolling video from the S-Video input and nothing from the composite.
Everything about the setup is unchanged apart from that. I've tried reseating everything (with the PC off this time), as well as re-installing drivers and changing cables/sources to no avail.
Is my card useless now? :depressed:

Weird. Do you have a stable video source with S-Video and composite outputs to test with? DVD player, cable box with analog outs, etc.

If you do, can you capture a short example video? (Don't bother with lossless, and a cell phone video of your monitor would also be fine.) I assume from the screenshot that it's scrolling diagonally.

VCR blue-screens are bad for troubleshooting because they're usually a non-standard signal, and of course VHS playback isn't great because it's unstable.

As far as I can tell the video source is fine. I've tried it on a TV with no issues.
The attached video should be the colour bar test pattern from a TBC-4000, but as you can see it scrolls across the screen.
I've checked the purple breakout box pins, and they all seem fine and mate with the card correctly.
It was all working perfectly until I disconnected the breakout box :smack:

Oh man, the only thing I can think of is to unplug the PC for longer (say a day) and then retry to see anything changed (the good old "the problem disappeared" trick).

I just don't know if that breakout is hot pluggable (similar to keyboard PS/2 cables, per spec actually not hot-pluggable. I think the more modern HDMI is not hot-pluggable either)

That is a connection seating error. Pins aren't making full contact.

- Your s-video cable may be too big and fat. (Most likely.)
- The purple/domino box may be damaged. (Far less likely.) These are about $10, not the end of the world. It's not like you damaged the TBC or VCR -- that would be bad, and been there, done that. BE CAREFUL! Take this as a warning.

Capture via coax to verify the card is fine.

Nothing is hot-pluggable. Even if it is, it really isn't. I have issues with eSATA, USB, etc, all the time. Anything that is two-way, not just one-way, can be a problem.

Thanks all for your suggestions.
I've tried another S-Video cable and another domino adapter with no success.
The coax input doesn't produce any static as it did when I first installed the card.

I suspect the card is damaged and am currently on the lookout for a replacement.

I finally managed to procure a 9800 which shows a steady picture, however S-Video only seems to display in B&W.
I've again tried different cables, adapters, settings and verified the VCR output shows colour correctly on my TV.
Is there a setting I'm missing on the 9800?

Does composite work ok? I wonder, "pin 4" of the S-video cable carries the color signal (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Video), maybe something gone awry in that area, but I'm just guessing.

Composite is working fine. I can only think that this card also has a fault with it.
As it's working for what I need it for, I'm not inclined to start poking around with it too much.
Thanks all for your suggestions :)

If or when you try to fix the s-video output, if you haven't already, try different cables (purple dongles and s-video), then cleaning the connections, etc.

Here are a couple other links that may be useful:

ATI AIW 9800 manual: shows internal header connections for s-video input, etc.

Discussion of using this type header on PCIe AIWs when "silver stab" connectors are not available.
I don't know if anyone has actually made a working cable to bypass the backplane connectors as they are discussing.

BW

Thanks BW
I tried making up a cable to connect to the internal header last night.
Same issue unfortunately, colour from the composite pins but only B&W from the S-Video pins.
I think this confirms something is definitely wrong with the card.