TV Card Problems

  • Thread starter Thread starter Turk
  • Start date Start date
T

Turk

Hi there. I hope someone can help but I'm afraid it might
just be a probelm with my system. Anyway, I'm having a
hard time getting my TV Card to work. I've got a ATI TV-
Wonder VE (an older card). My machine is older as well--A
Gateway G6-233 running 96MB RAM (I'll be upgrading to
384MB shortly). We recently had to restroe the computer
due to a virus and installed Windows 2000. I installed the
ATI MMC 7.1 and the required drivers. The TV card is
recognized and the picture is received, but the reception
is not too good. It is very herky/jerky. When I load the
TV viewer I received the following message: "Video Capture
and TV-on-Demand Performance will be degraded on this
system as DMA for the hard disk is not enabled. Please
check the System Setting in the Windows Control Panel for
the following devices "IOMEGA ZIP 100". This is obviously
my ZIP disc. However, when I check in the Control Panel I
don't see anything out of the ordinary. So, I'm hoping
that someone might have some insight into what I can do to
improve the performance of the TV tuner. Please feel free
to post a reply here or e-mail me
at "(e-mail address removed)". Thanks in advance for your help.
 
It sounds like your PC doesn't have nearly the necessary hardware to do
all the video processing required in addition to the overhead required
to run the Windows 2000 operating system. Reinstall Windows 98 or
upgrade the processor to 500mhz+ in addition to the intended memory install.
 
Please
check the System Setting in the Windows Control Panel for
the following devices "IOMEGA ZIP 100". This is obviously
my ZIP disc. However, when I check in the Control Panel I
don't see anything out of the ordinary. So, I'm hoping
that someone might have some insight into what I can do to
improve the performance of the TV tuner. Please feel free
to post a reply here or e-mail me
at "(e-mail address removed)". Thanks in advance for your help.
Click to expand...

IMO Turk is pessimistic about the hardware - back in the Ancient Days, the
Amiga ran TV very happily on a 1MHz machine, in the background yet, so I see
no reason not to run TV on your system, even with W2K, which is admittedly a
resource hog. TV is inherently slow, and should put no noticeable strain on
your system. (If it does, the card is badly designed).

The Help referring to the Zip drive is unhelpful. Try disabling the Zip drive
when you run the TVideo. The clue is the reference to the DMA - my guess is
that this must be enabled for you to run the TVideo. "Nothing out of the
ordinary" w. ref to the Zip drive doesn't tell you anything useful, either.
(I'd replace the Zip drive ASAP, BTW, -it's obsolescing technology.) There
are several DMA channels available, it may be that the Zip and TVideo card
are set to use the same one. You may find that by switching a shorting plug
you can change the DMA channel for the TV card, and that may solve your
problem.

IOW, there are a lot of unknowns, and my comments are merely designed to
point you towards investigations, not to solutions. I hope they've been of
some help.
 
Back
Top