Windows 2000 drivers available for Marvel G-400TV ?

[BeerMan]

Hi all,

ok are there drivers available for the
Marvel G-400TV ? - for Windows 2000 ?

btw, I would love to locate even beta drivers
for my Marvel G-200
I can't even play the TV module in Win2k,
this is disappoining.

Mark

[dgcom]

I think, if you search this forum well, you'll find some answers...

DGCom

[jpb]

You will definitely find no real "answers" anywhere, other than the statement that "drivers will be available someday". Join the club of frustrated Marvel/RRG owners who have been given the runaround by Matrox for over a year on NT/W2K drivers.

It should be a relatively trivial task to release drivers for W2K given that NT drivers already exist. However, Matrox will not even give a rough ball park estimate of when the drivers might be available.

Sorry, just using this topic to express my EXTREME frustration with Matrox. Everybody seems to go out of their way to excuse their behavior, but as a software developer on Wall Street I cannot possibly comprehend the kind of miserable developers that cannot accurately give an estimate of delivery time. If I tried to get away with this behavior my career would have been over years ago.

I have suffered the miserable experience of waiting for NT drivers starting around last December ('98), and it looks to be even worse this time. If it wasn't for the fact that most of the industry has the same abysmal record I would definitely avoid them (in addition to the fact that I didn't know how bad it would be until AFTER I bought my Marvel).

vent, vent, vent. Yes, I feel better now.

[coolfish]

The reason that they don't post their release dates for the drivers is that apperently in the past, when they missed these dates, people would bitch and whine.
Not much of a reason to me, nor do I like it, either.

I may just be a computer engineering student, but you definately should know how much work is involved in writing drivers, and making sure they work with everything involved. Is this an excuse? What can they do to get the drivers out faster? Add more people to the project? It's a fact, doing that only slows down the process. Open source the drivers so that software developers like yourself can pitch in? Dunno if it'd be possible.. how many drivers for MS operating systems are open sourced?


All I know is that bitching and whining hasn't worked in the past and it isn't going to work now. Only thing you can do is when you go buy your next video card, think about what you want it to do and in what OS, and when.

Coolfish.

[dgcom]

Hm...

1. NT 4 VideoTools works for 50% in w2k - so, I don't know how much work should be done to make at least public beta... I'm at least can watch TV now and wait for full release.

2. Have you ever looked at Windows DDK - a lot of info there, including full sources for some basic drivers...

DGCom

[This_Idiot]

I know, frustrating isn't it ?

There are some things that Matrox will respond to (although I bet you don't think so) and there are others that they won't. In this case, Matrox never claimed either NT or W2K compatability for ANY of their consumer products.

Therefore, they (in their own view at least) are at liberty to support or NOT to support future operating systems. Now the RT2000 has already announced W2K support, but not NT4. The G400s have a certain amount of NT4 support, but less W2K. The older cards have real flakey (ie none) support for NT and W2K, and to my mind this isn't unreasonable. Sure it's gonna make you pissed if you happen to own one, but you weren't ever promised support so why do you think you can demand it ?

So now I get all the hate mail

To put this into perspective, I spent a LOT of effort trying to get support from the userbase in the form of a petition to present to Matrox in order to persuade them that the users really wanted NT4 support. After 3 months of intensive canvassing I don't think we even reached the first hundred signatures. Now take that as a percentage of RR units sold and tell me that it should be number one on Matrox' hit list.

I'm happy to try it again if you want, but I don't think the results are gonna be any better

[gibverse]

Jpb,
Windows 2000 introduced a new driver model. Because of this, and the fact that unlike NT4, the OS has decent multimedia support, simply recompiling the existing driver will not work. If you really need some basic functionality, I do have everything except for capture working on my G200 Marvel under Win2K. Let me know if you instructions on how to do it, but I’m not going to guarantee it will work for you.

This_Idiot,
Alas, that’s the true reason Matrox doesn’t rush support for these drivers… Lower user base. In all fairness, given the price tag and the Marvel’s original intended audience, I am amazed we ever got an NT 4 driver, let alone the ones we did (they worked remarkably well given NT4’s pathetic multimedia capabilities). But Window2000 is a different creature than 2000, and I expect a slightly larger number of users to upgrade from 98 to Win2K due to its greater stability. As much as a loath having to keep 98 around simply to capture, it appears I must. I’m looking forward to see how BeOS fares when it comes out on Tuesday (March 28th). There was rumored support for Marvel/RR-G under BeOS on the forum before, and I’m hoping it may be a true story. If nothing else, it will allow me to ditch crash-happy 98.

If you want to start taking down names for 2000 drivers, put mine down as number one.
John Gibson, Marvel G200-TV

[dgcom]

This_Idiot!

You are wrong saying that "...you weren't ever promised support...[W2k]"

Here, is quote from e-mail, I got 11/2/1999 from Matrox Tech support when I was researching whether to buy Marvel or not (knowing, that I'll end up using W2k since I always used NT):

"We only have Win98 drivers currently available for the Marvel G400-TV. We are
working on the Win NT and Win 2000 drivers."

Another support person emailed me on 11/19/1999:
"Drivers for Windows NT and Windows 2000 are in development however, but they
have not yet been released."

You see - I was promised!!!

I don't want to publish the name of those support persons - they were really helpfull, but I got NT 4 Video Tools 2 weeks later I upgraded to w2k RTM...

What else can I say???

DGCom

[This message has been edited by dgcom (edited 23 March 2000).]

[wkulecz]

If the win2000 driver model is so "different" how come Hauppage can supply a slightly modified NT4 driver for their cheap ($20 after rebate!) card that plays TV and does capture perfectly under windows 2000?

Admittedly it doesn't have hardware compression, but the data rate of YUV2 at VCD resolution is only a little more than best quality MJPEG at 704x480 and the MPEG1 results are far superior! truely aproaching VHS SP in quality.

I assume tape out is the real problem, but I thought that was handled by the Zoran hardware codec so win2000 shouldn't make much difference here.

I assume Matrox has already blown off us G200 Marvel suckers :-(

With the "ULEAD VfW MPEG capture" that comes with Meadia Studio6 and my $20 Hauppage WinTV/Go I can produce real-time MPEG1 or MPEG2 form analog sources using the bundled Ligos "GoMOtion" codec. Results about about VHS SLP quality for MPEG1. Once I find the trick to setting the capture size to 352x240 (This is where Hauppage seems to have screwed up - offering 352x288 instead!) this will be a good cheap way to get decent VCDs quickly.

I haven't tried MPEG2 yet as something that plays on a non-computer is what I'm after right now, and unfortunately VHS tape from the Marvel is the still the best cheap solution for this :-(

--wally.

[This_Idiot]

DGCom,

Obviously I can't be expected to know about personal emails that Matrox have sent out.

The position that I have explained is Matrox' official postition, as stated in the sales information on their website, declared on the product packaging, and reinforced by comments on this forum from Matrox employees talking in an official capacity.

While it may be true that Matrox are working on these drivers, they have never "officially" promised them. Yes, I'll be as happy as everyone else when they DO, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

[dgcom]

This_Idiot, sorry for this rant... I think everybody IS upset that there is no VT for w2k...

I'm not absolutely sure, but I think I saw something regarding w2k ("feature OSes") support in early announcements on their web site.

I also think, that the issue is not that w2k isn't consumer OS, but the new technologies M$ is trying to put in all Windows OSes - WDM driver model, ntkernel, DirectX, etc. This should make drivers compatible with feature releases of Windows.

Look, right now, VideoTools are VfW-based, and to certify it for w2k it have to be DirectShow/WDM-based. Once this done - it will work in current versions of Windows (98SE and w2k). Matrox can stick with VfW for some time... But what they will be doing next? How to compete with others, who moved already to these new tech things?

I think, the delay with w2k VT is because they are developing them on top of those DirectShow/WDM. At least I hope so. Otherwise this would mean that I spent $300 for nothing...

DGCom

[tbrett]

I have full function of the video tools in win 2000, all i hade to do was change the driver to the NT release then restart in vga mode, install video tools using apcompat.exe

I can capture and everything and the video quality is great.

Now i dont know if this will work for everybody but it worked for me.