Sapphire ATI550 not right after reboot

[Dava]

I received my shiny new Theatrix card to work with GBPVR and the recordings look great but I have a problem immediately after any reboot.

The card image on live TV or recording is all fuzzy and monochrome. I have to run Windows Media Encoder to initialise the card properly, then it works fine in GBPVR during the same boot cycle. It is as though GBPVR is not initialising the card properly. I have tried both ATI's brand new drivers (31/10) and the older ones to no avail.

I am using the composite input on the card from a Sky box. This all runs on a P4 2GHz, 512MB with an NVidia 5600 256MB AGP.

If there is a startup applet that I could run to sort it out, as a workaround, that would be great.

Any ideas?

[sub]

It is as though GBPVR is not initialising the card properly.

I'm not aware of anything I'm supposed to do to initialise the card. It was supposed to just work when I use it. There is no initialisation done for this card or any other card.

[Dava]

I'm not aware of anything I'm supposed to do to initialise the card. It was supposed to just work when I use it. There is no initialisation done for this card or any other card.

Thanks for the info.

Looking at the picture it is as though it is an interlaced image of a stale still and the current (moving) output of the card.

Either Powercinema or WM encoder needs to be executed and then quit before GBPVR displays correctly. I will have to try it with the internal tuner to see if it only the composite that causes it but I suspect that the image quality will suffer as a result of going throught the RF modulation.

[csy]

I have the TUL/Powercolor 550 card, and don't suffer this problem. I suspect one of your other PVR applications is applying some sort of initialisation to the 550 card during bootup. I recommend uninstalling all your other PVR applications.

"ChrisTweak" is a software utility that you can use to correctly initialise the 550 card during bootup. It used it in the past (before ATI released their TV Control Panel utility with their drivers) and it works very well.

[Ommina]

For What It's Worth: I'm using the same Theatrix ATI550 (from Sapphire) and have not had any issues with it not behaving with gbpvr at all. This is using the drivers that were available when I did the install -- uhm, early this year sometime.

So it 'should' just work, out of the box, as it were. Which leaves us back, as suggested, to some sort of interaction between components that is unique to your setup.

Good luck!

[Dava]

Thanks for making me feel alone..:eek:

Seriously, I am glad that this card should/will work.

I tried Christweak and it seems that the card defaults to NTSC_M whereas I need PAL_I in the Video Capture (video decoder) settings. I am pretty sure nothing is doing this at boot time. Are you chaps in an NTSC area? Maybe the card itself just defaults to this?

The ATI CP applet does not have an option for region and I cannot find one in GBPVR. I presume it just uses the current card settings as Sub said.

It could also be driver issue as the original CD ones don't exhibit this (but many other) problem(s).

If you are in a PAL region, could you let me know which version ATI drivers you are using as a starting point?

Thanks.

[sub]

You could try editing direct.ini and setting the following in the [SETUP-Main] section:

ForceStandard=256

This will try forcing it to PAL_I, though this shouldnt be required, since the device should auto detect this stuff.

[Dava]

You could try editing direct.ini and setting the following in the [SETUP-Main] section:

ForceStandard=256

This will try forcing it to PAL_I, though this shouldnt be required, since the device should auto detect this stuff.

Genius!

Problem gone, thank you so much

Looking at ChrisTweak it does seem to autodetect but somtimes sees 4 lines rather than 625 probably sending it to this erroneous setting. Your software and support is fantastic.