Yet another configuration to share...DVD authoring

the_ripper wrote on 3/11/2003, 8:58 AM

Hello video friends,
OK, I received no bites on the Sony post, and it is a good thing. It sucked. I returned the Sony Vio to best buy, then went to our local build center and Had a box made. Intel PIV 2.4 GHZ, Intel motherboard, 512 DDR ram, and a 80 and a 40 gig duel HD set-up. What was sweet is they let me bring my own sound and video cards, and dvd burner. The DVD burner is a standard Sony 500ul? as I recall. The sound card I chose is a Audigy2 Plat. It is loaded with digital inputs and outputs, carries my PC into my home theater nicely with true 5.1 sound adn DTS. Plays Mp3 music very nicely. The Video card is a Radeon 8500DV card. The card has built in on the fly capture, which is big in my opinion. The other biggie is dual monitor support, one being the lcd and the second being a TV.

Here is where I am at. From the DVD clips I made so far they look great. I Pulled in pieces of a movie broadcasted in Dolby Digital, and the 1x realtime render worked great. Thats the BIG piece I like. ON THE FLY capture / rendering. I still need to see How a full movie does sync wise, time will tell. I am hoping I can say goodbye to 8 hr renders once and for all! You can render to AVI, Mpeg1 or Mpeg II Formats, with different quality levels. This is all on the PC level, I still need to burn the dvd to verify how this works. I can say without a doubt that the movie clips look good on my tv when played in pc movie players. - the_ripper

Comments

discdude wrote on 3/11/2003, 9:47 AM

Sounds like a nice system.

The ATI AIW 8500DV is an interesting choice. It is the first and only ATI video card to include DV ports and a silicon tuner. Those features proved problematic and no AIW released since have had those features. If you ever have any problems, please post them as I know several solutions/workarounds for common 8500DV problems.

the_ripper wrote on 3/11/2003, 12:53 PM

Have not had any yet...what should I look for? I do know the tuner is crappy. I use the svideo instead. The programming guide does not work either, but who cares. I wanted it for the dub feature anyways...what are some other issues? I will test and see how it performs. the_ripper

discdude wrote on 3/11/2003, 2:11 PM

The Firewire port is supposedly flakey. You can disable it and use another however. If you do use the built in Firewire port, make sure you connect the floppy disc cable to the video card.

the_ripper wrote on 3/11/2003, 4:34 PM

So far still good news...I added another Firewire Card with 3 ports, I will use that. LMK if anything else suspect comes to mind. I will let you guys know how the full movie render works out. I have also heard the Radeon card can be flakey if added to an existing set-up as an upgrade. In my case it is the only video card installed, other than the onboard version which seens pretty benign thus far. the_ripper

discdude wrote on 3/11/2003, 6:56 PM

Sounds like you are all set, the two biggest problems with the AIW 8500DV are the firewire and silicon tuner. Considering you won't be using either, everything should be fine.

I've heard problems about upgrading from a Nvidia to an ATI card, but that is due to lingering crap left by Nvidia's uninstaller and not anything with ATI per se. Personally, my Rage Pro to Radeon 8500 updgrade went without incident.

You can use two video cards, but the AIW 8500DV MUST be the primary card or none of the multimedia features will work.

ATI is really doing a bang up job with their drivers these days. Make sure you've got the latest.

The only major fault that I know of left is an incompatibility between ATI's current capture drivers and DirectX 9.0 Easy to solve though, see:

http://www.showshifter.com/support/faq.htm#catalystdrivers

the_ripper wrote on 3/12/2003, 3:50 PM

Another goofy thing is the sound. It is a bit confusing on using the audigy to capture sound. There are times you use the passthrough(playing games or movies), and others when you need to use the ac3-decoder(taping). The other goofy thing is you need to shut the second monitor(IE the TV) off when you use capture mode. otherwise you get resource errors, and the record icons never show up in menus. I have yet to record a movie from HBO and from my dvd player using the digital and svideo inputs, and dump to dvd through the Sony, THAT IS THE BIG test as far as I am concerned. If this fails, then so does my easy render concept. I still am concerned the Sony burning tools will not understand the so called DVD file. Different codecs and formats drive me batty. -the_ripper

discdude wrote on 3/13/2003, 10:36 AM

I have an Athlon based system with an Audigy MP3, Radeon 8500 and TV Wonder. This is similar to your setup (with the noticable exception of no DVD). I took me awhile to work around the bugs in my system. I can sympathize.

BTW, did you try out the brand spankin' new ATI Multimedia Center 8.1. It looks much improved over the 7.x line.