ATI 650 pci prob in Vista

[mikiem]

Well, the crashes are driver problems, no doubt about that -- IMHO at least after doing my best to eliminate any other factors & given that they occur on 2 OS es immediately after upgrading to Catalyst 8.3. Thankfully I haven't seen anything hinting that GB-PVR is effected by that end of things though, at least using the digital (ATSC) tuner.

RE GB-PVR, I'll try to find out more thru testing tomorrow...

I tried to find everything different between Config's channel scan in Vista vs. XP. Using graphedt, I can connect the "Microsoft ATSC Network Provider" with the ATI BDA tuner -- in Vista I can't. Vista has the 5th provider: "Microsoft Network Provider" that does connect.

Beyond that I don't know if either Media Center or GB-PVR or both use the ATSC provider or the [I guess you could call it] generic provider. I think this sounds logical anyway: If Media Center uses the generic provider, & works, while GB-PVR doesn't & doesn't, maybe that might be the problem? If both use the ATSC provider, then maybe the device is unavailable to GB-PVR. At any rate, I'll try to find out tomorrow, poking around with the Sys. Internal's stuff etc, seeing if I can do more to eliminate some of the possibilities.

I've not seen any indication that Media Center's latching onto the card, but thinking about it there's a definite possibility that something is -- I tried disabling the card in Device Mgr. and crashed Vista, & if that's repeatable, I'd guess that something has to be using it for that to happen... in the past I've disabled the card plenty of times without any unexpected effects. I'll try disabling it again just after a fresh boot into Vista, along with any checks I can think of to see if something's using the card, and if so, what.

I don't know anything really about the newer, generic provider, and didn't see anything useful searching on-line; I'll try again. I don't know why it's there, or why the latest, QAM capable 650 Vista drivers will only connect to it, while the XP version of the drivers are happy with the ATSC provider. Maybe it has something to do with DRM?

Since the XP drivers (in Vista) work for QAM & ATSC, my idea was/is that they were using the ATSC provider & that the ATSC provider is probably the Vista default; as mentioned there's a bunch of ATSC & QAM devices out there using Vista right now. OTOH if the newer Vista drivers use the generic provider, what points them to it in Media Center -- the only app I'm aware of that works with the 650's ATSC tuner? I'll try to come up with more and better info over the next couple of days.

Thanks Very Much for your patience... There are a lot of devices with the 650 chips out there, & ATI has a *maybe in the future* potential software solution in a revised Catalyst Media Center, which may or may not ever be available, and isn't much of a program to start with. The devices normally don't come with IR blaster remotes, so s-vid is out in Vista MC. Nothing besides MC will touch their ATSC tuner in Vista, & it won't currently do QAM. And, the cards are too light to make good paperweights.

[blisbell]

I have the old version with the ugly patch job so qam in xp does work.I also have the new usb and both have proplems in vista.That said the atsc does work in beyond tv on both.The usb one has some bugs in btv that are similar.sometime usb is not reconized as a combo,if hd is recording and you watch tv on analog then stop it it kills atsc side and will not work right til the power on the usb tuner is unplugged which may cause radom bsod like disabling it does.Ive tried numerous times to get these working in gbpvr,but just no luck.

[mikiem]

OK, I’ve gotten some additional info... I’m not too sure that it will help anyone, but in my [limited] experience posting what I’ve been able to come up with has occasionally helped someone else, and even [rarely] given them a place to start as they’ve taken it further. Again, thanks to everyone for their patience. I couldn’t find much documentation on DX or BDA in Vista, so at the moment some of this is obviously guessing – I hope logically, but guessing none-the-less.

The 650's Vista drivers are set up to connect to the generic provider I posted about earlier: msnp.ax. Testing is simple: connect them in graphedt. GB-PVR’s Config uses the ATSC provider, based on keys/values in the registry, and that provider will not connect to the ATI 650 Vista Tuner. It will connect to the XP tuner, so perhaps for many that is a viable alternative. It is possible to edit the registry so that GB-PVR’s Config will use the generic provider, and it’s then successful in building the graph; unfortunately tuning requests are then unsuccessful. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to overcome that hurtle, but at any rate the initial purpose of using msnp.ax was to see if GB-PVR would work with it and Vista using the 650, and it does.

The generic provider is opened by Vista’s MC, but not necessarily used – it may be automatic to prepare for whatever hardware as MC has no idea what you’re going to set up? It is opened by the ehrecvr which starts with Vista via the registry, along with the 650's drivers. This happens regardless the version of 650 drivers that are in place – bear in mind that the XP drivers will not connect to the generic provider. As Vista’s MC appears to work just fine with the current XP drivers, including OTA ATSC channel scanning etc, it might indicate that there’s another path or method that MC uses to access the 650 in the first place, and maybe at least some of the DirectX – DirectShow code is there for legacy hardware? And as posted earlier, with the XP drivers being compatible with the ATSC Provider: msdvbnp.ax, GB-PVR seems to work with the 650 giving no problems at all.

Re: Media Center... There are a few services that are set to auto start I believe (I’ve had mine to manual so long I’d have to double check) & the ehrecvr that starts thru the registry entry. None of these hamper GB-PVR’s Config in setting up the 650, but you should turn off the MC stuff to get a good or better video display out of the card. I set up GB-PVR with the MC stuff running because I wanted to see if MC would prevent my installing & setting up GB-PVR, and since it didn’t, I don’t think that MC’s contributing to set-up problems using the Vista drivers. According to [Microsoft] Sys. Internal’s Process Explorer, MC & GB-PVR each have processes that they start, and running one or the other, GB-PVR’s Config or MC, that doesn’t appear to change; i.e. Config’s scanning had no effect on processes for ehrecvr & vice versa. There don’t seem to be any conflicts, which I think is in line with MS guidelines that you should be able to run multiple instances of BDA & related software as with multiple tuner devices – of course that breaks down when/if you try to run the same tuner in 2 different programs, so as mentioned I think it’s a very good idea to shut one or the other down in actual use.

Thanks

[flumpdumpy]

Have you made any more progress on this? I'm having the same problem with a USB 650 under Vista x64 SP1.
Now that vlite has been updated to include slipstreaming SP1, I'm thinking of using it to gut out Media Center from the install. That should prove whether or not it's a Media Canter issue.

[dnjake]

I will try to summarize my experience with Vista and ATI 650 cards.

I have been successful getting a 650 to work both with Media Center and with my own software. But I have run into three sets of problems.

One is with media center itself. First I have never found a way to get media center configured to work both with OTA ATSC and with FM radio. Second I have had the problem of bad information about physical channel numbers in the atscchannels.xml config file. Initially I had one bad channel. But at about the same time I installed Vista SP1, I had several that were wrong. Once I set up correct information, Media Center generally seems to work reasonably well for OTA ATSC.

The second was with ATI display drivers. The set that came with Vista seemed to work all right. But when I installed upgrades, I ran into a problem with the contrast seeming to change erratically. I wondered if ATI had introduced some kind of macrovision style content protection. I dealt with this problem by using system restore to back out the driver upgrade. On Vista system restore seems to work very well. I further dealt with the problem by switching to Nvidia. I have not had any problems with crashes with either manufacturer's display adapters. I have had no video problems with NVidia.

The third set of problems has to do with ATI's AVStream driver. The version that is now available on Windows update breaks my software. The direct reason is that the new version of the driver has a version of the BDA Tuner component that will not connect with the BDA ATSC Network Provider component. The old one did. It is possible to replace the BDA ATSC Network Provider with the generic BDA Network Provider and at least get graphEdit to work sometimes. But there are still problems when I try to use the ITuner interface on the BDA Network Provider. I can't get it to accept any of the tuning requests or tuning spaces that I have used successfully with the BDA ATSC Network Provider. However, Media Center did seem to work the one time I tried it. It may be possible to get the Video Control to work and manage tuning the graph. In any case, I have not found any need for the new AVStream driver for OTA ATSC. So I just backed it out with system restore and my problems seem to have disappeared. On the other hand, I don't like the situation where I can't stay up to date on the drivers without breaking my system.

[flumpdumpy]

So, if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that there is a version of the drivers that do work correctly? If so, what version?

[blisbell]

Cat. 7.7 and up has a white noise bug on analog side for all cards.8.3 is sh**.I have gotten both working in gbpvr now.From reading this thread I installed xp drvers through device manager and gbpvr started regonizing the tuners,qam studers but ota works just fine.Hope this helps.Im using the last driver ending with .250 as build # on previous driver at ati site,xpmce drivers.Using vista 32 ult.http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/mce/t...s-mce.html

[kayphoonstar]

So, if I'm reading this thread correctly, people have the ATI 650 pro Hybrid card working for Digital tuning using the 8.2 XP drivers. Is that right? Or is it the 8.2 or earlier Vista Drivers? Can anybody clear this up for me.

I started playing with graphedit last night and found the Network Driver issue that was described. But still no tuning ability. . .

[blisbell]

Use the 9.3 xp drivers not vista.The problem I think and is also the problem with the tv pack or windows 7 is that microsoft create a new way to do digital tv and it calls a different file so causes it not to work where the xp drivers still use the oldway you can say.I not sure if Im wrong someone correct me please.This is the only way i can think to explain it.

[kayphoonstar]

So can anyone specifically say which files from the XP driver package need to be replaced in Vista? When I try to install the XP drivers via device manager, I get the yellow exclamation and the driver doesn't start. I don't know if this will work for me but I want to keep trying - BTW, I'm using the ATI AIW HD with the 650 chip. . . (I know I may be in a different situation here.)

Interestingly, I've tried to work around the Network provider issue by simply omitting the
tuning type entry in the BDA.ini file like this:

[ATI 650 Pro (QAM)]
TUNING_TYPE=
TUNING_SPECIAL=2
FILTER_TUNER=ATI BDA Digital Tuner
FILTER_CAPTURE=ATI BDA Digital Capture
PIN_TUNER_IN=Input0
PIN_TUNER_OUT=MPEG2 Transport
PIN_CAPTURE_IN=MPEG2 Transport
PIN_CAPTURE_OUT=MPEG2 Transport

Although this gave me a couple of non-critical net.Framework errors, it got GBPvr to give me the same error that Total Media gives ("Already in use") in Vista. Sadly, that is progress. . .. Total Media will scan in XP but not Vista.