TV PLAYER FAILED TO INITIALIZE VIDEO on ATI AIW 9000

[schmosef]

Hi Guys,

I just rebuilt a friend's PC with XP Home. He has an AIW 9000.

I followed all the instructions for installation @ ati.com. I installed Catalyst 5.13 and MMC 9.08.

We didn't have a cable line to test the TV decoder so I didn't know until later that it wasn't working.

He gets the infamous "TV PLAYER FAILED TO INITIALIZE VIDEO" error when he tries to watch TV.

Looking at his device manager he seemed to be missing the PCD and MVD codecs. I had him reinstall the WDM integration driver and now he's got all the codecs installed but the TV tuner is still not working.

I've also posted a thread on this issue at Rage3D.com. They have a lot of similar threads there but I couldn't find one that spoke to my specific issue.

Anyway, any advice would be appreciated.

Detailed System Specs:
Asus P4P 800 Motherboard bios (latest non-beta bios)
Intel P4 3.2GHz CPU
2GB RAM
ATI AIW 9000 AGP
ATI Radeon 7000 PCI Slot 1
NEC FireWire Card Slot 4

[rylan]

Tried removing all of the ATI drivers, then reinstalling them w/o the PCI card in there? I've seen plenty of cases where a PCI graphics board doesn't get along as well as it appears to, even from the same manufacturer.
Also try moving the PCI card... if by Slot1 you mean the one next to the AGP board, then it is likely sharing some resources.

[schmosef]

I was thinking of doing that if nothing else worked.

He had this working before the rebuld with an older set of drivers and MMC.

According to Asus the PCI card isn't sharing IRQs with anything.

We did some video capturing via his firewire card that worked quite well too.

[schmosef]

Ok, issue resolved.

He uninstalled Nero 7 and then uninstalled and reinstalled the ATI software. All is working now.

[rylan]

Wow thats crazy if Nero was messing up something. Maybe it just needed the ATI clean reinstall.

[Wombat]

Actually, I'm hearing plenty of "Nero 7 is bad, stick with Nero 6 for now" from the interweb.

[schmosef]

The ATI TV decoder seems to be really unstable.

Now it stopped working after Ulead VideoStudio was installed.

An uninstall and reinstall of the ATI drivers and MMC fixed it. Again.

Then, for no reason, they stopped working, again.

And another uninstall and reinstall of the ATI drivesr and MMC fixed it. Again.

Aside from issues remaining with Nero7, maybe this is just a bad release of the drivers/WDM from ATI?

[rylan]

...maybe this is just a bad release of the drivers/WDM from ATI?

Well judging by how ATI and nVidia drivers have been in the past, thats certainly plausable.

[Dr Mordrid]

My experience with the AIW X600 is that its display and capture drivers are also unstable, and this goes back to before I installed NERO 7 + latest update (which by the way is running nicely minus INCD4).

ex1: If the system does a hard shutdown due to a kid/dog hitting the power cord etc. it takes 2-3 reboots to either VGA or Safe modes to get it to start up without dumping to POST. When listed it's always the display driver that's loading when it dumps. My Matrox cards never did this.

ex2: capture drivers have a habit of not starting on about 5-10% of reboots. Have to do a repair install and another reboot to get 'em back. Been that way for 3 different driver builds.

Subbing in the Matrox APVe or a PCI video card makes the relevent symptoms go bye-bye.

The AIW's are basically pretty good cards with a good feature set, but IMO ATI still has a way to go when it comes to driver stability.

Dr. Mordrid