HDTV Wonder BDA drivers on WinXP

[jdhayes]

All:

I'm trying to setup my HDTV wonder with GB-PVR. Current status is that the card is working properly with both the supplied ATI software and snapstream's beyond TV 4.2. GB-PVR, however, does not see the card. I have two questions...

A) Do I need to go to ATI and install the Windows Media Center drivers (on my Windows XP box) in order to get the "BDA" drivers?

B) If so, will that break snapstream's Beyond TV?

THanks in advance
~Jeff

[jdhayes]

Found the answer to my problem. But first, to answer the questions I asked...

a) The ATI Windows XP drivers DO install BDA drivers. The tool GraphEdit can tell you all about it. So the ansewr to my question was "No".

b) I didn't try this, but I'm assuming that either the setup would abort with a warning or else I'd break my driver stack entirely.

So, what was really driving my questions was a user interface issue. I did not understand that in order to get the BDA drivers listed, I first needed to use the drop-down list and change the recording source to "BDA" then use the settings button. Once I correctly set the drop-down to BDA, then the settings button correctly called up the BDA drivers and told me that I had an ATI HDTV wonder installed.

Now, that GBPVR is working, I'm on to my next problems and trying to get it to not crash.

[sub]

Found the answer to my problem. But first, to answer the questions I asked...

a) The ATI Windows XP drivers DO install BDA drivers. The tool GraphEdit can tell you all about it. So the ansewr to my question was "No".

b) I didn't try this, but I'm assuming that either the setup would abort with a warning or else I'd break my driver stack entirely.

So, what was really driving my questions was a user interface issue. I did not understand that in order to get the BDA drivers listed, I first needed to use the drop-down list and change the recording source to "BDA" then use the settings button. Once I correctly set the drop-down to BDA, then the settings button correctly called up the BDA drivers and told me that I had an ATI HDTV wonder installed.

Now, that GBPVR is working, I'm on to my next problems and trying to get it to not crash.

Is there still a question in there?

[jdhayes]

Heh, not exactly at this point. The initial problem is solved and the ATI HDTV Wonder is configured and working... to a point.

The program was crashing on me as soon as I hit pause. I suspect an incorrect setup for my codecs/muxes. But, to be fair, I only got about 5 minutes to fool with that before my wife threw me off the computer so she could watch Nova. I've read some of the threads here about the codex/muxes -- including the one that said not to use "transport stream" which is what I think I have it set to.

I'll post back if I don't get it working after some experimention with the playback settings.

I'm keeping notes so hopefully I'll be able to post a config guide for HDTV Wonder users once I get it working...