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ATI Multi-Media Center works on 8886!!!

post #1 of 13
12/1/02 at 11:33am
Thread Starter 
It works ... but ...


IMHO the Sager TV tuner is excellent but the "TV Studio" software that comes with it is awful. It is hard to figure out, cumbersome to use and has some bugs.

The solution may be to use ATI's MMC 7.6 (beta) for the TV Wonder card. This version is for Windows XP. Here is a link to it:

http://mirror.ati.com/support/driver...-tvwonder.html

It is a 15 mega byte file that took a couple of hours to download on my crummy phoneline ISP.

Here is how I installed it:

First, make sure you have installed the Sager supplied TV drivers.
Next, in control panel, remove software, delete TV Studio.
Check, control panel, system properties, verify the Aver WDM drivers are in place and working properly.
Execute the downloaded MMC package and follow the simple steps.

What does not work? The live TV display is scrambled. It appears to be a sync problem.

Everything else works perfectly as far as I can tell. If you click on surf available channels are displayed and look good. Even though you cannot see live TV you can record and playback TV and it works excellent. The sound works. The library function works and will find and catalogue all the music and video files on your hard drive. This is an awesome software package!

I believe the live TV scrambling problem can be solved with new drivers for the Aver card. I recall reading something about free drivers that were called something like "bt drivers." I will try to find some and see if they work. If anyone else is willing to work on this I would appreciate the help.

Bill
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post #2 of 13
12/1/02 at 2:09pm
Thread Starter 

Live TV problem solved.

The live TV now works after installing new drivers from here:

http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/custom.html

By the way, the chip used in the 8886's tv tuner is the BT848.


Bill
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post #3 of 13
12/1/02 at 3:24pm
That's sweet, thanks for the info! Does this program record in NTSC (720 x 480)? As a general question, when you record tv, what format is it in? I'm assuming you have the choice of CIF or VGA or NTSC and it'll be mpeg1 or 2, right? Thanks!

Habib
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post #4 of 13
12/1/02 at 4:56pm
Thread Starter 
The max vertical resolution for this version is 240. Under the Digital VCR heading you can select whatever file type you want.

UPDATE: btwincap drivers fixed the live tv problem but now the recording function does not work. Oh well, back to sqaure one.
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post #5 of 13
12/2/02 at 3:40am
This is a good idea, I don't care for the included softare, I can't even watch half the channels. Keep up the good work, I'd like to see an alternative that works.
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post #6 of 13
12/2/02 at 12:41pm
Thanks for the info! Someone who is interested might consider contacting aver to see if they can help solve the problem... I don't know much about tv tuners though or I'd try and help out more, lol.

Habib
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post #7 of 13
12/2/02 at 6:39pm
I tried ATI Media Center, and I could only get it to partially work. My first problem, I have the BT878A not the BT848 and I could not get all of the correct settings for the btwincap... With the supplied drivers the TV tuner cannot synchronize with the software, and although with the btwincap drivers I heard much better sound off of the antenna when trying to set up the ATI Media Center I could not find the correct settings to actually get the Software to enable the TV tuner. Since you said that you have a BT848, I am beginning to wonder if I have the wrong software altogether.
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post #8 of 13
12/2/02 at 6:59pm
Assuming you both have the 8886 (as opposed to the 8882 or an older model), one of you is either getting the wrong specs shown on their capture card or something is up, lol. Yes, that sounds vague... and obvious. I meant to ask though, how are you finding out what your chip number is? Are you doing it through windows or is it written in the manual or what? If it's through windows, your drivers (the ones supplied on the cd) should have recognized the correct tv tuner because they are obviously the correct drivers, so you should be getting an accurate report of which tuner it is... So that leaves me confused as to how you can each have a different reported chip number unless the tv tuners are actually different models....

Habib
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post #9 of 13
12/3/02 at 2:37am
I was reading the documentation for btwincap, and it states that the included card software won't work. So... I found a program called The FlyDS that may work and some compatible remote control software. Look at site:

http://asvzzz.narod.ru/

It basically explains everything, except that The FlyDS is not free but 30 day trial period shareware ( certainly long enough to see if it works... )

After looking some more, I found a program called CapTV at:

http://www.micromediaenterprises.com/captv/
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post #10 of 13
12/3/02 at 3:10pm
I don't know much about this, as I have said... but I find it wierd that reception is improved by different programs... I always thought that would be more of a hardware issue (and since the hardware is obviously capable of capturing the channels, since someone here has gotten them, I thought that any tv program would perform the same in terms of capture). I can see where interface and complexity and features would be different, but people are actually getting more channels with some programs??

Habib
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post #11 of 13
12/4/02 at 1:03am
Well, some software takes better advantage of the capabilities of the hardware than others. For example, the 878 seems to be a more capable chip than the 848 but the TV Studio software doesn't use any of the additional features. With some of the software that I tested I actually seemed to pick up radio!!! I just couldn't get the device drivers to work properly, so I reinstalled the original software and have had better results than I first did. Even so, the manual fine tuning in the supplied TV Studio software is nowhere near as good as the automatic fine tuning that some software provides. I just couldn't get the other packages to function properly. Anyway, I was wondering what kind of antenna 8886 ( 888E ) owners are using for off the air broadcasts and what kind of quality they are getting. My off air reception is horrendous.
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post #12 of 13
12/4/02 at 1:03pm
Thread Starter 
In our house we only use free brodcast television so our antenna system is already in place. I bolted a 24' steel tower to the side of the house and put the atenna at the top with an amplifier. We get four channels-- thats more than we have time to watch.

I was really hoping the rest of you guys would get this ATI software working and then tell me how to do it.

Bill
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post #13 of 13
12/4/02 at 3:25pm
My friend if I had a sager I would do it for you :-) I only wish, lol. Oh well, eventually. 'Til then there are tons of great people here that will help out. (I love this place)

Habib
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