ATI 650 Problems - Page 2

Originally Posted by Zappcatt

He went over to the POS/Computer thingy and read something..then walked with me and grabbed them off the shelf..taking them into the back room.
My guess is either:
1) He got a message telling him to pull them.
or
2) His buddy emailed him telling him that they were the best card out there and asked him to grab everything they had in stock....


Just telling you what I saw...

Originally Posted by Dimahnbloe

Well I have been messing around with this thing for about 24 hours now and I can clearly say without a doubt it has the best SD qaulity tuner on the market. This thing made what once looked like a crappy cable feed, look completely digital. I was using the 550 Pro before and had tried the new nvidia card along with hauppage pvr 250 normaly my girlfriend could not tell the difference between them but this time she asked on her own if I had finally broken down and brought a digital cable box. She could not believe the difference. For some of you that had decent cable feeds to begin with going from the 550 to the 650 chipset may not have made that big of a difference but for me it did wonders. Personally I plan on keeping this card because If someone told me all I had to do was pay 129 plus tax to get Digital Like SD Quality, I would have done it in a heart beat.

Before I begin with the bad news let me tell you about my situation. These are the conditions:
1. I live in an apartment on the third floor In Orlando Fl
2. There are other apartments around me that are taller.
3. All the major networks in my area are broadcasting in HDTV (13+ stations)
4. Because of my location and the distance from stations, initially I was unable to effectively pull in mor than 2-3 of them on the HDTV Wonder (not the 650 Pro)
5. I run both the antenna that Came with the HDTV Wonder, and the amplified Terk antenna that follows it's design. By combining them with a splitter/combiner and pointing them to different directions, I was able to get all channels in my area from my apartment (most stations are 20+ miles away)). The signal is being amplified by 13db antenna that does wonders for the signal

Now for the bad news. I had the same experience with the digital tuner that have plagued many around here and in other forums. Believe it or not I was actually hoping the card was defective, because if that was the case all we had to do was waite a few months and we could buy the new revisions. But after fiddling around with it, removing the splitters that I had, and disconnecting the second HDTV antenna, I finally got the card to work. I can now get most the the channels that I got before in each direction that I pointed the individual antennas to.

Why do I say this is bad news you wonder. Well for starters when they say
an amplified antenna is required. It is a must. The tuner used in this card does not seem to do well without the amplifier. For me, I could not tune a single station without it. Considering that the guy from Hot Hardware review sample came with an updated Tuner that could also tune in QAM, I believe that issue may have been known by ATI and they may already have a revision to fix it. The reason that I Consider this to be bad news, is because that this does not seem to be a driver build error and that the tuner itself has the issue. Considering they mandated an amplified antenna, they new about the issue and may have no intention on fixing it for a while. Note: the specs for the HDTV Wonder does not mandate the amplified antenna. So if you are waiting for a software fix for this issue, don't hold your breath. Return the card and wait for the next revision. Based on what I seem when this thing is working, it will be worth it. For the people that still want to try I have left some instructions below to try and remedy the situation. Note: This is not a guaranteed fix, this is simply what I had to do to get it working for me. Good luck...

People with MCE
1. First of all for those with MCE get the latest drivers on ATI's web site.
2. Do not install the New Catalyst Media Center with MCE. At least for me, it made my system completely unstable, causing some pretty bad crashes. This is only my Personal experience, since system components can differ greatly from one user to the next, your mileage may vary.
3. Do not believe the signal strength indicator within windows MCE. On my HDTV Wonder I have to have the strength bars in the green before I could tune in a station without stutter blackouts or tearing or pixilated images (Digital Snow), but with this card, certain stations would show up even though the signal strength indicator in MCE displayed only one bar in the red. In fact, I could only have three bars up and still get a clean uninterrupted signal (I believe that this a driver issue)
4. Disconnect any splitters/Combiners that you may have. It seems that this thing needs a strait shot to the antenna and needs an unhindered amplified signal. Routing of any sort seems to degrade the signal to beyond tuner capable detection.
5. Switching to Gold Plated Coaxal cables seemed to help a little bit with signal strength. Not anything that could be seen on the MCE signal strength detector, but it help reduce stuttering on the week stations significantly.
6. If you have a second tuner card in your system (including analog) remove and see if it makes a difference. It did for me. Some times it worked with the second tuner in there, most of the times it did not (could be a systems resources issue for me so you could probably ignore this hint.)

If I think of anything else, I will update this post.

Update 08/28 1:30 PM:

I have good news and them some more bad.

The good news:
First of all use of splitters can still be done, but you have to use multiple amplifiers to get it to work. Amplifying once before the signal is split to stengthen the original signal that is coming in from the antena and then again after the splitter for each TV wonder 650 you intend on using (diagram shown below). Reamplification for the HDTV Wonder was not neccesary due to the fact that it does not have the issue that the 650 pro does with HDTV signal. It however did improve signal strength a tad (less digital noise on from weaker, more distant stations), so I did it anyways. The other bit of good news is that you can disregard number six with regards to removing the second or third tuner. It seems to work just fine for me after removing all tuner related drivers and reinstalling them I now have both the HDTV Wonder and the 650 Wonder recieving signals.

Now for the updated bad news. Using multiple cards in the same system works OK when recording 2 HDTV Programs, but if you start out by recording SD programing on the 650 Pro and then try to watch HDTV material with the HDTV Wonder, MCE will not allow you to. All you get is a message advising you that the second tuner (HDTV Wonder) needs to be redetected in the TV setup area or mce will simply crash. Not good at all. It is essentialy rendering the second tuner useless even though it is not being used. I am not sure if this is an issue with media center itself or can be rectified by ati changing the way that MCE detects it's tuners via driver a driver release. If it's an MCE issue, this is probably the straw that will break the camels back for most of you because I don't see microsoft putting any more resources into this operating system considering the deadline they are battling for Vista.

For those interested, I have attatched a simple diagram of how my setup is currently laid out. Again I am not saying that this will work for you, but it does work for me. To each his own.

Originally Posted by redjr

Dimahnbloe,

Thanks for your informative post. This gives me hope that the 650 MAY have potential after all, but I'll reserve final judgement after I've had more time to configure my antennas, amp., etc. It was late Sunday night when I finally got around to installing the 650 in my newly built HTPC. I had done some other major upgrades during the day like adding a new 7600 nVidia card and a couple of SATA HDs. I had also swapped out a DL-DVD SATA drive for a PATA drive - due to the spacing and configuration of my case/mobo. I installed the 650 and loaded the drivers. Everything seemed to work fine. However, I did not execute any MMC software first. Maybe I should have.

Earlier I had installed MCE2005 and Rollup 2, but had not yet configured MCE. This was a new/fresh install of XP/MCE and I was waiting till I had all new hardware installed. During the confguration of MCE, I noticed some problems with the MS Remote cable eye changing channels on my SA8300HD DVR STB. It was taking a long time to change channels, and I could never go above channel 140 on my STB(maybe that's a limitation of the NTSC tuner of the 650. I don't know). I proceeded to get MCE to 'move on' and detect my digital channels, and this is where no signal strength registered as green bars in MCE for each channel. Only 1 red bar displayed for each of the channels as the process cycled quickly through the 13 channels it was able to detect in my viewing area.

At this point, I was using a straight-in cable from an externally mounted Terk antenna, aimed directly at the majority of towers in my area. No splitters or in-line amps either. After reading your post, it seems clear to me that some form of amplification is required to boost the signal to a detectable level for the 650 tuner. At the time, I was NOT using a little amplifier that came with my antenna(laziness on my part, because it was attached to another TV card in another computer), so this weekend I will definitely move it over to the 650 and see if MCE will detect any local OTA digital channels. Fingers crossed!

So, with this in mind, I will try reconfiguring MCE using the amp on the 650 and determine if I can receive any OTA channels - or NOT. If not, I may consider returning the card to BB for a refund. I really don't need the SD capability, but would like to see the quality of the SD signals nonetheless.

Is there a concensous that the 650 indeed needs some form of amplification? Could this be the fatal flaw in the design of the 650 that Ati knows and seems to want to rectify with a total recall of the cards? Will a new version be made available?

redjr...

Originally Posted by Dimahnbloe

Your Welcome,

I however would not recomend the inline amps that came with the Terk Antena, it's pretty week and did nothing for my setup when I initially tried it. Of course I do not have a terk antena that is big enough to be mounted externally, but the terk Antena I do have seemed to do little more with the inline than without. Your best bet is to run to radio shack and grab one of their +10db amplifiers. If not and you don't mind going via web, a Channel Master +13db amp would be the best bet

You may need to disregard the signal meters that are present in MCE and try to tune the channels anyways to sse if they are comming through. In my setup most of the channels I get are only reported with one red bar by MCE and the channels are still as stutter free as the HDTV Wonder.

I am actually going to keep this card even with the recall. I like the quality of the picture on both SD and HD material now that I have mine working. I would return it, but I am affraid of the next time that this product becomes available again maybe sometime after christmas and that would be a dissapointment. The way I figure it, after football season I will RMA it and get the new revision because of the recall. In my mind it's a win win situation. Good luck.

Originally Posted by 311Hemi

This may be a dumb question, but what is the difference from the new 650 to the old HDTV Wonder?

Originally Posted by 311Hemi

This may be a dumb question, but what is the difference from the new 650 to the old HDTV Wonder?

Originally Posted by wraithrsw

Bad thing is, it will have the built-in broadcast flag that studios can use to block you from recording.

Originally Posted by CityK

Do you know that for a fact, or are you surmizing that because there is some sort of DRM "feature" to the card that it has to be BF related? Best indication I've seen is that the DRM is in relation to analog source content protection ... which itself could be wrong, but more likely if you ask me. Also recall that in the land of America, BF was struck down by the courts. And although many interests might desire employing a BF, they would currently be asking for reprimand .

Originally Posted by wraithrsw

It may have been struck down but considering studios have the money and muscle, it's not a stretch to say it'll come back.

My guess is it's there just hidden until the time comes.

Did some looking into and it seems the BF is currently on the Theater 650 via DRM support. It just can't be used until it becomes legal but it will support the BF if (hopefully just an if) it is sent back for another round and passed.
http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=4292

The analog source content protection's already in place on current ATI cards and they've put it on recent HDTV Wonders.

Originally Posted by CityK

wraithrsw, thanks for the link.
I completely agree -- parties with a vested interest will make every attempt possible to bring it back....probably tacked on as a rider to new J-walking legislation . But there is also nothing to suggest that its "return" is imminent in the near future

Its possible that ATI have implemented it ... but I'm also a bit skeptical for reasons that:
- its an added cost to manufacture ... and if you don't currently need it, why bother unless its an imminent requirement?
- why would only ATI persue this route...why wouldn't other manufacturers (whether were talking STB or computer devices) want to hedge their bets too?
- in order for the receiver to be BF compliant, the hardware will require a microcontroller robust enough to handle the authentication process (i.e. the cryptology involved). I doubt that (dispite what guru3d has written) the threatre650 has such circuitry built in. Its a complicated enough IC as it is, and I'm doubtful that ATI has added to its complexity ... just personal opinion

I have to say that I really dispise what guru3d wrote there -- "There's also an integrated hardware DRM engine for support of the upcoming broadcast flag". First of all, who or what is their source for the info of an included DRM engine targeted for BF. Second, the "upcoming broadcast flag" part really irks me. There is nothing imminent! There is nothing stating that further attempts to introduce BF will succeed! Are they that much of a cow that they have already allowed vested parties to laud BF into existence? Jebus! What a bunch of wankers.

Anyways, my point here is that I beleive that they are guilty of surmizing that the included DRM is BF related. I would caution others to take the same approach ... both to believing that it has BF capablities and also to tolerating BF to be lauded into existence...until the laws change, it don't exist.
See SHS's post here.

Edit - I can't spell. Or write. Oh well.

Originally Posted by wraithrsw

I'm thinking ATI's going this route of appeasing the studios...They all want the big studios on their side.

because since their merger with AMD is for real, AMD's been trying to upstage Intel when it comes to media.

Originally Posted by christoc

I guess for punishment I spent the day hitting up Best Buys in the St. Louis area looking for a 650 card. After checking my 4th BB I found 2 cards up at the Best Buy in Bridgeton. Two of the other BBs I tried said they had 4 in stock, but they couldn't find them anywhere.

So I brought it home and am now trying to get it setup. I think I'm trying something a bit different than most folks. I'm trying to get it running on a WMC machine, but this machine isn't hooked up to a TV for display. I'm hoping to get it to record the one HD channel that we can't get on our local cable and use my Xbox360 to get the recorded shows off this WMC machine and display them on my 50" out in the living room.

I'm trying to use my OTA antenna that's on top of my old Directv dish, but I'm guessing it's no an amplified antenna as I only get snow when I try to tune in a channel here on my WMC machine. So tomorrow I guess I'll try to find a cheap amplified antenna just to see if my whole experiment will even work. If I can't get any HD channels I'm SOL and will take the 650 back.

If I can get an HD channel and record, but can't watch that recording on my 360 this whole experiment is worthless, so I'll take the 650 back then as well!

Hopefully this all works out though, otherwise I have to come up with some other way to watch/record LOST, as we don't get ABC in HD over cable here in St. Louis.

Originally Posted by christoc

Well, after giving the system a day of testing I'm done I'm taking everything that I purchased yesterday and Saturday back to the stores this week. I just can't get a good enough signal to make the ~$300 invested worth it. I'll just have to miss LOST in HD until I figure something else out. Nevertheless, I can still watch it in SD, and all the other shows in HD.