ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0 works, power supply issue

[lordsmurf]

Correction: Only the video works in MMC, no audio. So not good.

This is odd: When you enable Audio Playback in VirtualDub, the overlay works, though jerky. Huh?

[jwillis84]

Its hard to comment without relating things I'm not sure about.

From rewriting the INF it looks like they were confused, or Microsoft switched the default multimedia class devices underneath in DirectX for the Audio and Video crossbar.. originally it looks like they used the same one.. later Microsoft definitely introduced a specialized one for Audio versus Video.

I am an amateur at this and DirectX technology.. so I'm very unsure of what I am looking at.

Comparing it to the empia2860 INF which does very similar things flawlessly on Vista, Win7 and Win10 it "appears" this can be sorted out.. no guarantees though.

If it works with the ATI USB 2.0n it is (possible) similar fixes might work with the PCI models as well.

I was deep diving in old MSDN archives last night and (saw) that Win10 x32 does not enforce driver signing.. so another reason to use 32 bit versions of windows.. no vendor lock-out for old hardware !

closer I get.. more demands on my personal time.. so i may be taking a break here..

i (did) finish rewriting the INF file for ATI USB2.0n but have not tested it

its not reverse engineering or code rewriting.. its just rewriting the instructions to the operating system on how to use what's there.. the drivers themselves "could be" fundamentally be broken.. but time will tell

[jwillis84]

lunch hour

.. a bit more explaining

DIrectX has well known "GUIDs" for specific interface types.

The INF file tells the Operating System this or that driver should be "hooked up" to a specific GUID.. and programs running on the inside of the Operating System "expect" specific behavior from devices hanging off those GUIDs.

When a GUID "changes" as it did in various DirectX versions, the whole behavior can be renegotiated .. its a different Interface.. and reliability goes South.

DirectX is not "supposed" to change the behavior on old Interfaces going forward.. but they stop testing them too.. so they are basically unmaintained.. also.. if the GUIDS were perfect "why change at all".. basically they were discovered not to be "perfect" and had problems.. so they made new ones to replace them.. the old ones continued with those bugs.

You can't always just "re-rig-the-plumbing" behind the scenes.. things can stop up and stop working.. but that is [kind of] what I'm trying to do..

In the ATI driver world, there are only three important drivers.. tuner, video, audio

They are hooked up by the INF file to GUIDs using the windows registry as "glue" that tell's the operating system they have a "tuner" a "video" and a "audio" device.. and that they have specific features by default.

Windows then loads the binary dll's called .sys files and starts "probing them" to make sure they are happy and sane.. that's what shows up in device manager. The result of those device "tests".

If it works then you have very common DirectX GUIDs also called Interfaces you can write programs to use.. without writing hardware specific code.

ATI drivers are 32 bit and have worked on everything from Win95 through Win7 (mostly) but the INF file for "gluing" things together was kind of not quite explicit.. it left a lot up to the imagination of the operating system to flesh out.. and sometimes the operating system guessed wrong.. and the drivers didn't quite work.