ATI HDTV Wonder (Dual Two or more) doesn't work in one PC! Help.

  • Thread starter Thread starter jsidlosky
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J

jsidlosky

Either of my ATI HDTV Wonders works great, in any PCI slot, using the
latest 2030 drivers.

If I install both though, not only can I not get an image in the ATI
DTV application (let alone any 3rd party PVR software), but sometimes
while loading the drivers for the second card, my PC will reboot.
Othertimes, just after loading the drivers and soft-rebooting my PC, it
will reboot before showing the desktop (have to unplug the PC power
completely, hard-reboot then it will come up). But either way, the DTV
application will no longer work. It does show the signal strength for
each channel, just won't show a picture.

Anyone using two or more multiple HDTV Wonder's in their PC? I
submitted a trouble ticket to ATI, their answer was referring me to the
user-manual (come on...).
 
Either of my ATI HDTV Wonders works great, in any PCI slot, using the
latest 2030 drivers.

If I install both though, not only can I not get an image in the ATI
DTV application (let alone any 3rd party PVR software), but sometimes
while loading the drivers for the second card, my PC will reboot.
Othertimes, just after loading the drivers and soft-rebooting my PC, it
will reboot before showing the desktop (have to unplug the PC power
completely, hard-reboot then it will come up). But either way, the DTV
application will no longer work. It does show the signal strength for
each channel, just won't show a picture.

Anyone using two or more multiple HDTV Wonder's in their PC? I
submitted a trouble ticket to ATI, their answer was referring me to the
user-manual (come on...).
Click to expand...
Do you have any reason to believe their is support for 2 cards?

I'd be happy if they just supported Multview with my AIW like they
originally posted on their website could be done but then removed after I
ordered.
 
I have no reason to beleive they don't support 2 cards, other than this
is ATI and they probably didn't do it properly.

They don't advertise "Supports multiple cards in one PC", but neither
do Ethernet network card vendors, and you can put 5 in your PC if you
want and they just work.

Their drivers probably use global variables and they don't check if
they are getting IRP's comming down the stack to them from different
places, so they just crash instead. Go ATI.
 
I have no reason to beleive they don't support 2 cards, other than this
is ATI and they probably didn't do it properly.

They don't advertise "Supports multiple cards in one PC", but neither
do Ethernet network card vendors, and you can put 5 in your PC if you
want and they just work.

Their drivers probably use global variables and they don't check if
they are getting IRP's comming down the stack to them from different
places, so they just crash instead. Go ATI.
Click to expand...
I'm not a programmer so I could be wrong but I think support for network
cards is entirely in the O/S and has support for multiple networks. Getting
what ATI claims can be done seems to be a matter of luck so getting
something they don't claim seems to be stretching things a bit. :^p
DTV runs my P4-2.4 at about 50% so 2 cards wouldn't work for me anyway.

Avivo is supposed to launch tomorrow. Maybe things will change.
 
Yeah, honestly not trying to brag or anything stupid, but I've
developed device drivers for a living for 5 years (stopping a few years
back).

Network drivers and any other drivers are pretty much the same.
Windows has a nice uniform driver structure in which all drivers are
developed under.

Basically though, your code has to know and handle multiple hardware
cards and requests from above and deligate them appropriately.

The difference in a driver supporting one card and multiple cards is
the difference in a well coded driver and a poor one. Honestly, if
your driver can't work well on multiple cards, it probably has bugs
working on one card. This is far from the rule but its something I
like to say :-).

Anyways, AverMedia A180 officially supports multiple tuner cards in one
PC. So I placed an order for 2 of them and they should be in tomorrow
or the next day.

ATI really pisses me off. Its like, because of their brand name, they
feel like they don't need to support us when the little guys like
AverMedia do it right.
 
Yeah, Hauppauge did it right, as did AverMedia, as did Fusion 5... just
ATI didn't get it right.
 
I got an official response from ATI Technical Support about running 2+
HDTV Wonders in one PC.

The offical response is: "You cannot have more than 1 HDTV Wonder is a
system at any point in time."

Go ATI!
 
I got an official response from ATI Technical Support about running 2+
HDTV Wonders in one PC.

The offical response is: "You cannot have more than 1 HDTV Wonder is a
system at any point in time."
Click to expand...

Heh. You should sent a response back, saying "How ironic, I just
decided I cannot have *one* HDTV Wonder in my system at any
point in time."
 
J. Clarke said:
I'm a bit puzzled as to why anybody would go for the HDTV Wonder over a
Dvico to begin with. The Dvico works well out of the box and has decent
third-party support, and is in its fourth or fifth generation of
development besides. And they _do_ support two boards in one box under
MMC.
Click to expand...

In reviews I've seen the HDTV Wonder has marginally better
video quality. The problem, as always, with ATI is not with
their hardware -- it's with their drivers. They can't write a
decent driver to save their freaking lives.
 
I got an official response from ATI Technical Support about running 2+
HDTV Wonders in one PC.

The offical response is: "You cannot have more than 1 HDTV Wonder is a
system at any point in time."

Go ATI!
Click to expand...

I'm a bit puzzled as to why anybody would go for the HDTV Wonder over a
Dvico to begin with. The Dvico works well out of the box and has decent
third-party support, and is in its fourth or fifth generation of
development besides. And they _do_ support two boards in one box under
MMC.

While ATI's homegrown TV hardware has always been pretty decent, the
software support for it has been patchy at best and their determination to
keep their hardware interfaces secret has pretty much killed third-party
development.
 
Peter said:
In reviews I've seen the HDTV Wonder has marginally better
video quality.
Click to expand...

The Dvico and the HDTV Wonder do exactly the same thing, capture a stream of
bits and transcribe it to the disk. Any differences in video quality come
from the decoding software, which is independent of the board. The HDTV
Wonder may have a slight advantage in _analog_ video quality over the
Fusion II or the Fusion 5 Lite, which use BT8x8 chips, but I doubt that it
would have much over the Fusion 5 Gold.
 
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