Matrox have done it again :(

[Brian Ellis]

Against my better judgement, I bought a G-550 DH graphics card for my video system (only make my supplier offered). I was reluctant from the lack of drivers for Marvel et al and the general atrocious quality of Matrox support.

Although this card allows me to do basic video work, it does not allow me to view videos under W2k. Why? Because it does not allow overlays under W2k in many systems. On research, I've found that many clients have complained about this with the G-550 in particular and other models, to boot. For example,

http://forum.matrox.com/cgi-bin/mgaforum/search.cgi?action=simplesearch&SearchIn=ALL&ForumChoice=ALL&SearchTerms=overlay&BooleanAND=YES&SearchDate=ALL&SearchUser=&ExactName=no&File=temp-2452425-022025-I7v8.cgi&Total=134&StartAt=12

will bring up complaints for this year, mostly related to the overlay problem under W2k for video work.

If you go down these threads, many users have abandoned Matrox altogether (as it looks I'll have to do) as their inadequate support has not been able to sort out the problem. Some have managed to get it working by all sorts of acrobatics, which should not be necessary.

Matrox have known about this problem for many months, probably over a year. Why have they not been able to produce drivers which allow their cards to work? They have had time.

This smacks of the Marvel fiasco with many beta drivers for W2k. Now we have another one with a plain graphics card and what appear to be beta drivers that do not work. I've even tried the older Microsoft-certified drivers for this card, after having totally eradicated the later ones: it makes no difference. I've also tried following the advice given to others in their support forum. I've literally wasted many hours trying to get their stuff to work, when I expected a 15 minute hardware and software installation: this should not be necessary and these lost hours are totally unproductive.

Matrox apparently have not yet learnt that any piece of hardware and their accompanying drivers should be installable and working in a quarter of an hour and as much again to set it up.

My advice to anyone contemplating a new graphics card for video or other overlay-intensive work: steer clear of Matrox if you wish it to work first time under W2k or -- presumably -- XP. You may be lucky or you may waste many hours, never to get it to work at all.

[Sciascia]

Precisely why I jumped ship months ago. Doesn't look too promising for future prospects either. I really think that with all of the DV stuff coming out that Matrox just feels that there isn't going to be a big enough market to develop analog capture cards at the consumer level or develop the tech/drivers to bring their older stuff up to speed. Probably a good marketing strategy in reality, but they just handed the entire market to ATI. At this point they are the only game in town for combo cards and they work great.

[Debbie]

Brian,

I thought you had more grey matter up in your cabesa (top floor)!!

Debbie

[Brian Ellis]

So did I, Debbie, so did I I swore never to buy another Matrox device again after they broke all their promises re Marvel (although I like their products -- when they work). I was more or less bludgeoned into it by a supplier and I reluctantly agreed to keep the peace.

Like the players who take the Weakest Link's Walk of Shame, I got what I deserve.

Anyone care to swap a new Matrox G-550 with drivers for a trouble-free graphics card?

[GinoCyber]

Did you really read all those threads in your link? I only checked out the first 10 and it looks like they got it fixed. Some had agp detection problem, others had divx problems and 1 guy had to uninstall a game.

Ciao

[Vidgal]

My G-550 worked right out of the box with the downloaded drivers. That machine is operating on the much maligned XP, but I am having no problems with the setup.

[Brian Ellis]

Vidgal

It would seem some are lucky and some ain't.

Gino

I maintain it should not be necessary. In many cases in this and other forums/netlists, Matrox have recommended reformatting the boot disk/partition, adjusting some BIOS settings, reinstalling W2k, reinstalling SP2, reinstalling DirectX, reinstalling Matrox drivers and then reinstalling all the apps -- and it still doesn't work (as in my case ). If you consider that this is "got it fixed", I damn well don't. I consider it gross incompetence on the part of their driver authors and that it should even be considered as normal to have to do all that just to get a graphics card to work is a supreme arrogance. If I were alone to suffer from these problems, I would keep quiet, but there are many recorded identical cases on the 'Net.

IOW, Matrox have yet once more perpetrated something unreliable on the unsuspecting public. This can happen accidentally because it is impossible to test every combination of hardware, firmware and software. What should never happen is that the company, recognising this, sits back, does nothing and then suggests that all their customers are wrong by telling them to reinstall everything from scratch, as if they were faulty in the first place, especially when doing so entails the waste of a day, at the user's expense of course. This is a gross insult, especially when they know that there is no guarantee that it will work, anyway.

I still recommend those contemplating a new graphics card for video work -- or anything else requiring an overlay -- to steer well away from Matrox. This is compounded by the fact that such cards do not even offer hardware acceleration at 24 bit colour depth. These cards are probably fine for word processing and similar jobs, but not for sophisticated work.

[Dr Mordrid]

Sorry you're having problems Brian, but remember that hardware failure you had with the Fasttrak and it being the mainboards fault after you cursed out Promise for days on end?

Also; most all the G550/dualhead posts on that page refer to problems in Win9x/ME and NT4. How do they connect to your Win2K problem?

That said: by video work I'm presuming you are talking video in terms of using DVDMAX?

If so is the project an even multiple of 32 wide? This means a 704 full screen width in all formats but DV and MPEG-2 which will work at 720. MPEG-2 will also work at 1/2 D1 (352x480) and 2/3 D1 (480x480).

You can use smaller frames than these but they DO have to be an even multiple of 32 wide. This problem not only affects Matrox cards but the GeForce DH cards as well, so either there's something in the water or Windows is involved somehow.

There is a hack for fixing this, DivXG400, that patches the 32 wide problem by adding pixels to get the right width. It's here;

http://www.tac.ee/~prr/videoutils/

Many such overlay issues are fixed by moving to XP as noted by Haig previously. XP has a new way of handling such things (VRM).

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

Doc

Yes, I agree that there may be a hardware conflict of some sort which is why it appears with some and not with others. But it is Matrox' cavalier attitude that really bugs me, not the fact that a problem exists for many of their customers. It seems that they just bloody well couldn't care less (or could care less in Transatlantic vernacular ). They have a number of stereotyped answers on their forums, usually ending up with the reformat... solution that has been reported many times as being unsuccessful. At no time have they even suggested they are looking into the problem and hope to have new Win2k drivers shortly (maybe they had their fingers burnt doing that with a different product ). They just let us stew in our own juice, with a Matrox burner under the pot, turned up high.

At least, the Promise guys tried to help and they have a decent manual (and they replied to e-mails). They are a much more professional bunch, altogether.

Yes, all the projects are 480 x 576, 704 x 576 or 720 x 576. And its not just my projects that don't work: it's also commercial DVDs, as well, even those with Autorun features and their own PC software built in. Neither does timeline scrubbing work in MSP6.5. Depending on the software, I get a number of different error messages but they all boil down to the simplest one, to the effect of "no overlay present, update your graphics drivers to work with DirectX". And Sandra confirms the absence of the overlay at all resolutions and colour depths, even with the simplest default congurations.

[zeb7]

I agree 100% Brian , these & the Marvel problems are unacceptable software limitations.
I could go on about the marvels ,but its all been said before

Its a little ironic that you heavily researched the AMD & MB problems only to be ripped off
with a overlay problem complements of good old Matrox

I would move back to win98se , i don't like the idea of forced upgrades to XP
, it has nothing i need , so i'm happy with win98se.
If you're keeping the Matrox with win2k and not yet involved it in an experiment with a microwave
Post a reply and i'll try to give some more info on the options below .

1 .Get WMP to use an MPEG1/2 decoder that dose not use overlay for output
This will not fix powerDVD just the playback though WMP.

2 .Buy an add on mpeg1/2 (and DVD) decoder such as ,
Sigmadesigns "hollywood plus" (40ukp) or the newer "Xcard"(90ukp) (which includes mpeg4 decoding)

[Ted222]

Brian,
I kind of agree with you, but I read this forum regularly and opted for the G450/W2K option when I ordered my new computer - because of what I have read here and other forums. I have a G450 Marvel on a P3/W2K configuration and a G450 on a P4/RT2500/W2K configuration - both work great - very good dual monitor support.
I did not opt for the G550 or WinXP which were both available at the time......and no regrets here.....and it was as expected from the info I got from the forums.
Ted

[Brian Ellis]

OK, guys, I got it working, at least partially. But what a palaver. I decided that one possible cause was the dual boot on the computer, so I decided that I would try it W2k only. First problem: the W98 partition was too small for W2k. I couldn't FDisk it because I had NTFS and FAT32 partitions on the same disk. I therefore had to low-level format it and the other disks, fdisk them, format them, reinstall W98 from a floppy (my W2k is upgrade) and then start the install of W2k +SP2. I then installed the Matrox drivers (basic one-screen 1024 x 768 x16), other essential drivers and so on. I then installed the DVD things first and then other video software (total of 47 reboots, if you please ).

I can now play DVDs, so I assume the overlay is now functional. I still cannot scrub in the MSP 6.5 timeline, which I was able to in WIN98SE. Anyone any ideas, please?

What a way to spend a beautiful, sunny Sunday and it has not qualmed my ire re Matrox, because all these hours of work should not be necessary!

[miya]

The fact that this was fixed by reinstall of Windows indicates that the problem was something with your setup, not with the Matrox. Why has your ire with Matrox not waned?

[zeb7]

Brian one thing you mentioned above got me thinking ;
"no overlay present, update your graphics drivers to work with DirectX"
and as the post by miya suggests a problem with something other than the matrox diver
I'm thinking that may be the directX version you had was not compatible with matrox driver
Or did you reinstall the same DirectX update ?


I don't know what to suggest for MSP but if you post you currant settings in the
"Ulead32.ini" that relate to display i'm sure someone will help.

I think these are the sections that would be needed .

[HardwareACC]
NotSaveOpenDML=1
AviPlayEngineMCI=1
DisableAcc1=0
RecompressWhenScrubbing=1
DirectAccessDVAudio=1
;AlwaysKeepLastFrame=1
HwCodecID=dmb1

[VCAP4_CAPTURE]
DisableDriverBeforePlayback=0

[Nav]
QuickPlay=0

[Performance Evaluation]
DDrawEnable=1

[mikiem]

Hey Brian

Only thing Matrox ever did for me was sell me a marv that ate a monitor, which was actually rather nice since the monitor was under xtended warranty --> got a much nicer one out of the deal.

At any rate, whilst it seems your original problem is solved more or less, while I was posting here for a moment, thought I'd make a suggestion that seems to work fairly well, in my situation at least. Figure the worst it'd do is exercise the finger you use for the delete key.

I like XP pro better then win2k, once I got used to the fisher price aspects anyway. And, it will coexist happily enough on the same partition as 98SE, though you likely won't find much about this capability anywhere.

Making it all work actually involved only one or two work a rounds: I renamed the folder for win98 SE's media player, then changed any paths in the registry to reflect that. I use Outlook Express, so I had to point one of them at the same place to store messages as the other. And optionally with ATI, I installed the multimedia stuff in separate folders for each OS.

Otherwise, everything is shared, and I even got away not reinstalling most of the apps in XP -- exported reg files from 98SE worked with over 95% of the installed apps, so I didn't even have to look up serial numbers.

mikie