ATI AIW 7500 Radeon has no sound?
 

I installed a the 7500 Radeon and I'm using the purple rectangle input dongle but I'm not getting any sound. Video works fine. Is this the right input connector for this card?

I installed the card in my WIN2K machine and did not get any sound when I used the purple connector. I am using MMC 7.7. When I switched the sound input directly to my sound card I was able to get sound while doing a capture in MMC. Is it okay to connect directly to the sound card instead of through the ATI card? While viewing the preview of the capture everything looked fine, no audio sync trouble. I was using the MMC to capture in Huffy. I only dropped a couple of frames over 15 minutes. But, when I used the ATI file viewer to view my captured video the sound is way out of sync.

I also tried to capture in Virtualdub. When I captured video only everything worked smoothly. I also had to connect directly to the sound card in Vdub. When i started to capture sound along with the video Vdub got grumpy. Vdub started working really slowly like it was overloaded or something. I dropped frames like crazy. I would not have thought that just adding audio would make Vdub act all crazy.

Any ideas?

Yes, that's the correct input block. :thumb:

The ATI input alone is not enough. You have to next use either (1) the external loopback cable into the sound card, or (2) the internal 4-pin AUX cable between the ATI card and the sound card. All audio is routed into the sound card. The ATI breakout box is more for convenient. You can bypass it if you want to.

This sometimes happens with ATI MMC and AVI. There's never been a discernible pattern as to why it happens. In this situation, simply use VirtualDub instead.

Disable the audio preview and try again. ;)

Thanks Smurf, that helps out a ton.

I was able to get everything working last night. I did some testing and I did find something weird. I captured in either VDub or MMC using Huffy and then saved the file to my hard drive on my P4 machine. Then I encoded to MPEG2 using TMPG and everything worked fine. I then tried to transfer the Huffy file to my mulitprocesser machine to speed things up. TMPG would not open the file after doing this. I transferred by wired network connection and also by USB flash drive and neither one worked. Is this weird? I was able to open the Huffy file and convert after moving with Handbrake but not TMPG. Weird?

Verify Huffyuv is actually installed on the multi-CPU system.

• Open VirtualDub,
• go into capture mode (File > Capture AVI),
• and then go to Video > Compression

Do you see Huffyuv listed? I'd bet it's not there.

Install instructions for Vista and Windows 7: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...l-huffyuv.html

Furthermore, you may need to alter your environmental settings in TMPGEnc.
That's covered in the guide: Encode to MPEG with Tsunami MPEG Encoder (TMPGEnc)
Read this section: Problem opening source files

Doh, I never thought about installing the Huffy Codec to my other computer. That could explain it. I received my uber VCR yesterday so now I'm ready to get to work instead of "playing" with old computers.

If you're saying that Handbrake was able to open the video without Huffyuv being installed, it's likely one of those encoders which relies on an internal codec library instead of the system-wide codecs installed into the OS (DirectShow on Windows). A lot of players, editors and encoders have gotten away from relying entirely on DirectShow in recent years, because of the many conflicts caused by system-wide codecs.

Codec packs were especially dangerous for many years, making messes on systems -- sometimes uncorrectably so!

Because I have access to professional encoders, and prefer other freeware alternatives, I don't use Handbrake that often.

I think Handbrake uses ffmpeg for its backend, which has native support for HuffYUV. Lagarith is also now supported as well, but for decode only.

Wait a second. Are you saying that ATI AiW 7500 VE is not capable of digitizing the sound on its own? Does it have to loopback to the sound card? In other words in VirtualDub in Audio Device section I am not supposed to see Audio From Device? This is strange because ATI 600 USB, ATI TV Wonder 750 USB/PCIe can digitize the sound on its own. Anyway, nice to know. I'll be installing Terratec 7.1 Aureon Universe sound card then.

ATI AIW cards are graphics and video only -- not audio. It routes the sound through external audio hardware. This is one of the reason that the card was excellent -- you could use a high quality audio card.

The 600 and 750 were "PVR" cards -- not really capture cards. They were all-in-one for audio and video (and the audio was not exceptional high quality, but merely acceptable).

Mystery solved. :)

A notable exception is the PCIe AIW cards. They do indeed capture sound without using any loop back. Confirmed and tested with a AIW X800XT PCIe card (I didn't even have any sound card drivers install when I tested it).

Hmmm... didn't know that.
Have you had any luck using this card in Windows Vista or Windows 7?

Personally I had no luck with X800XT under XP SP3. Maybe the card was faulty but now I doubt it.

No luck, installing the XP drivers in Windows 7 results in VirtualDub locking up. Right now the machine dual boots XP. I am planning on testing XP x64 when I have time since I believe ATI made capture drivers for it. That will yield me native GPT drive support and being able to see all the RAM in the machine.

Just make sure to check how the sound is recorded. I recall that ATI 600 USB had horrible sound. It would have automatic levels. So you would capture a particular footage. Then you would capture the very end of this same footage. Then you would compare the sound and notice that the volume of what's supposed to be identical is very different. This is not the case with ATI TV Wonder HD 750 USB/PCIe. So if I were you, I'd check if X800XT does the same.

I would not call it horrible, just not a high-quality audio card dedicated to sound.

I wasn't stretching it. I meant horrible. :D SoundBlaster/Creative, the audio parts of TV Wonder PVRs of HD 750s are not audio card dedicated to sound as opposed to say Lynx products. But for VHS or Hi8 home video they'd do the job. However, the ATI 600 USB is just horrible if sound volume varies unpredictably.

It sounds like you had a defective stick. I've never seen that behavior.

If you want terrible audio, look at the Hauppauge PVR 150. Now that was truly awful, with distorted sound. It was a known model defect that affected all 150 cards. The video also suffered from AGC and IRE issues, unlike the "big brother" PVR-250 and PVR-350 cards.

I thought that automatic volume control is a feature and not a defect.... Well horrible feature when it can't be switched to manual.... :)

Ok, did you try to capture the entire an hour or 2 hour long footage and then recapture the very end of same footage and then compare the sound of the end of take 1 and the sound of take 2? If you did and the volume was the same, then maybe my stick was of a different design/chipset. You also claim that yours didn't have crippled chroma. I'd be interested to test yours if you still have it.