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Are ATI catalyst drivers impossible to use for XP MCE?

825 Views 3 Replies 3 Participants Last post by ddeen, May 26, 2007

Jordan

Discussion Starter · May 24, 2007

Okay, I'm about to mow down unsuspecting pedestrians at full speed in a busy intersection at the moment, so please bear with me.

1) I'm a relative newbie to HTPCs

2) I'm a veteran at PCs

3) I'm apparently incapable of setting up a HTPC

Here's the rig - it's cobbled together, but is stable under XP/Pro without the ATI drivers installed, and was stable for a day or so before I installed the CCC from ATI:

Dell 400SC chassis, mb

P4 3.4 EE (prescott) w/ Dell heatpipe cooler and supplemental 80mm fan

2GB RAM

92mm, 42 CFM case fan

DVD/RW (can't remember make)

250GB PATA system drive

2x500GB SATA storage (mostly empty)

Sapphire Radeon 9700 AGP 8x video

On board sound (7.1 card died recently)

PCI Firewire

External FW tower w/ 1.5TB total storage

*edit - SpeedFan shows temps for all components in the mid to high 30s, with the processor peaking around 45-46C under extended 100% loading.*

I've searched for info on the ATI drivers, but didn't find any other people driven to homicidal rage over the seemingly endless BSOD and MCE incompatibilities. When I clean-installed MCE, it appeared to find radeon drivers via windows update. Life seemed good, and the outlook promising. But the closest to 720p resolution was 1280x720/60, which lost most of the border (and the start bar, first column of desktop icons, and the top icons in MCE) to overscan on my Hitachi RP set.

Enter CCC. I set a custom resolution and timing, and like magic the resolution matched the display. Again, life was good. Then I tried to run MCE, and found that my "video card or driver is incompatible with Media Center." WTF? I could go into media center, but now none of my videos would play. Outside of MC, Nero Showtime plays everything fine. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling in several different combinations; the blue screens just got more frequent until the last reinstall, which results in a BSOD everytime I try to login.

All I really want (right now) is to create a box that will become the replacement for my DVD jukebox. I have already ripped about 1/3 of my library to VOB, and about half of that I have converted to DiVX (with mixed success). I just want it to work when I run MC. I'm fine with ripping and categorizing separately, as long as I can hit the green button, hand the remote to my wife, and leave the room. Is that really too much to ask?

At this point I'm either going to kill someone, or sit down and do yet another clean install. And I haven't even tried to fire up the HDTV wonder sitting on the desk (that adventure ended in tears 2 years ago).

Any suggestions out there for Radeon devices? Do I really _need_ to get powerstrip and use the WinMCE drivers instead of CCC? Should I just fleabay the mess and get a mac mini?

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umdivx

· #2 · May 24, 2007

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jordan /forum/post/0

I've searched for info on the ATI drivers, but didn't find any other people driven to homicidal rage over the seemingly endless BSOD and MCE incompatibilities. When I clean-installed MCE, it appeared to find radeon drivers via windows update. Life seemed good, and the outlook promising. But the closest to 720p resolution was 1280x720/60, which lost most of the border (and the start bar, first column of desktop icons, and the top icons in MCE) to overscan on my Hitachi RP set.

Welcome to the world of computers not MADE for TV's. What your experiencing is called over scan. There are several ways of dealing with this. First is having a TV that can accept 1:1 resolutions from a PC and deals with overscan from a PC directly in the TV's menu.

Second is that ALL ATI and Nvidia drivers can deal with overscan directly in the drivers.

Instead of getting MCE based ATI drivers, just get window XP based drivers, and once you have those installed and running, get into the advanced menuing system of ATI drivers, in there you'll find a section for overscan compensation, which will fix your issues.

Quote:
Enter CCC. I set a custom resolution and timing, and like magic the resolution matched the display. Again, life was good. Then I tried to run MCE, and found that my "video card or driver is incompatible with Media Center." WTF? I could go into media center, but now none of my videos would play. Outside of MC, Nero Showtime plays everything fine. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling in several different combinations; the blue screens just got more frequent until the last reinstall, which results in a BSOD everytime I try to login.

again run XP based drivers on NOT the MCE ones. You'll find that the level/date of the drivers for XP are newer than the ones for MCE.

Also are you running an MPEG2 decoder? Nvidia's purevideo, PowerDVD, WinDVD????

Quote:
All I really want (right now) is to create a box that will become the replacement for my DVD jukebox. I have already ripped about 1/3 of my library to VOB, and about half of that I have converted to DiVX (with mixed success). I just want it to work when I run MC. I'm fine with ripping and categorizing separately, as long as I can hit the green button, hand the remote to my wife, and leave the room. Is that really too much to ask?

Nope not too much to ask at all, MCE is a little tricky to get up and running, need the right drivers, the right everything. What I have found is that I install MCE, do ALL the windows updates first, before doing anything else, I DO NOT let windows or windows updates install any drivers or any one piece of hardware. and once all of that is done, I go through and install all the drivers and software from there.

Less is more when in comes to MCE.

Quote:
Any suggestions out there for Radeon devices? Do I really _need_ to get powerstrip and use the WinMCE drivers instead of CCC? Should I just fleabay the mess and get a mac mini?

If anything skip the ATI drivers ALL together, head over to www.guru3d.com and get NGO or Omega modified drivers.

Or scrap the ATI card and get an nvidia, I've honestly found that nvidia cards/drivers have worked soooo much better in MCE than anything else.

- Josh

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Jordan

Discussion Starter · #3 · May 25, 2007

Thanks for the reply.

I'm good witht he hows and whys of the displays...just the seemingly utter incometence of ATI to write a display driver for their own cards that can run without crashing. FWIW, the videos I was watching were XviD, with the drivers seemingly installed properly based on WMP10 's ability to play the video without a problem while not in MCE mode.

I'll give the guru3d drivers a shot. If there's still an issue, I will proabably scrap the project altogether, put XPpro back on the machine, and run it as a rip/store/burn server - and find some other way to play the video.

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ddeen

· #4 · May 26, 2007

You can read alot on the various drivers for ATI cards at www.rage3d.com forums. I have MCE as well and do not use the latest ATI drivers, I use the Catalyst 5.13, MMC 9.06.1, DAO 9.08.

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