MMC 7.5 first look: Update! XP + Radeon + Video Capture

[rbV5]

Found at Rage3D, trying with my VIVO.

Looks like a big step-up initially. Sporting a cool new "Blended Window" feature that gives the video overlay a transparency, so right now I'm typing over the blended video window(TV)...this is VERY cool and is working very well. The applications are using the XP GUI, so the look is very much improved as well. It also includes a new ATI VCR codec and many new preset capture settings, windows media encoder, time lapse and motion trigger settings. Includes a new library app for sorting your media files as well.

Installation was uneventful, the video and sound initialized properly using the default XP drivers and everything seeems to be working fine. I'll play with the video capture shortly. At first look, I'd say ATI needs to get this out, its going to make a lot of people happy.

 

[GetInMyFatBelly]

Looking to find a place to download this and the new Gemstar myself, can't find a place that will even let me get in, none the less download it. Any suggetions???
Thanks...

 

[DaLurker28]

Wow... downloaded it for my ATI TV Wonder, and wow! It works flawlessly, (faster than 7.1). Everything works perfectly and the newer skin looks much sleaker and fits in better w/ my Win XP.

 

[Tired of the Bull]

MMC 7.5 and New Gemstar are posted on alt.binaries.misc

Getting them this way is far better than ony of the FTPs that are running.

 

[anime]

i just installed it today and I must say this a must have for ati owner. I love the new look. overall I'm happy

 

[rbV5]

Using MMC 7.5, Windows XP with Driver 3286 and the native Rage Theater WDM drivers appears initially to be a potent combination for video capture.

First install yielded very poor capture performance and 100% cpu use using the video-in application. Heavily dropped frames in all but raw AVI capture, Yada..Yada...Yada

Complete registry prune and a clean, but modified, 3286XP driver installation and new MMC installation was the key.

Initial results:

CPU use using TV(video-in) :
6-30%
Mpeg-2 Codec DVD High setting preset 720x480 NTSC 525 lines 8.00 M Bit/sec 44.100 KHz, 16bit stereo
CPU 62-72% No dropped frames, 1 minute capture = 59.9 MB
ATI VCR Codec Full Resolution (CCIR-601) 720x480 NTSC 525 lines 7.2 M Bit/sec 44.100 KHz, 16bit stereo
CPU 58-80% No dropped frames, 1 minute capture = 54.5 MB

Using the Windows media codec, I'm dropping frames at the "local" setting, but no dropped frames at the "lan setting".
The "Lan" setting, 1 minute capture = 5.28 MB.

The video quality seems as good as the performance. The MPEG-2 and ATI VCR are equally impressive high quality with fully synced audio, and similar sized files and cpu load. The WMV compression is very impressive, video quality is pretty good and 1 hour of video would fit on a CD at the default "lan" setting I used.

I must say that I am very impressed so far. If you have a Radeon..you want MMC 7.5

 

[rbV5]

DVD 7.5 performance is very nice as well. I tested "Scary Movie" and the CPU load varied from 14%- 28% depending on the Action, almost exactly the same as PowerDVD 4. Picture quality is equal between the two at first glance, and both sound excellent as well through my new z560's hehe

I tested The file player with scenes from "Star Wars Episode 6" and "Saving Private Ryan" Divx, and 20%-40% CPU load using the 3.11 alpha codec. Excellent picture and sound as well.

I cannot however coax VCD to play with the VCD player, they play fine with the file player, but for some reason I cant get the VCD player to work. MMC 7.2 had finally supported Mode2 VCD's so hopefully that'll be fixed when this gets released.

 

[NicColt]

It's also on alt.binaries.multimedia.utilities

>Mpeg-2 Codec DVD High setting preset 720x480 NTSC 525 lines 8.00 M Bit/sec 44.100 KHz, 16bit stereo
>CPU 62-72% No dropped frames, 1 minute capture = 59.9 MB

Oly sh!t - if that performance is true then this is on par with Hardware encoding. and even I would be truly impressed.

BTW what's your system specs for this, are you still using a duron 900 ?

 

[rbV5]

<< BTW what's your system specs for this, are you still using a duron 900 ? >>



Specs are per "My Rig"

It's true Nic , be aware that the "DVD High" preset is I frames only.......
However, to follow up, I then used the default IBP (4 predictive and 2 backward looking frames) setting along with the "DVD High" capture preset resulting in: CPU 70%-84% load, NO dropped frames!

Oddly, the file size was only slightly reduced, while the CPU load was increased a little, nearly the same result to the ATI VCR codec. None of the resultant 3 files is significantly different from each other actually, and the file sizes are all within 10mb of each other (I wasn't exact on the file lengths) More testing results will be forthcoming soon!

 

[NicColt]

Ok I'm going in..... maybe this one will allow for two sound cards at once. wish me luck.

 

[elkinm]

Were can I get MMC 7.5, I have the original Radeon and don't have the money fo the 8500DV.

Thanks

 

[Jgtdragon]

Just downloaded and installed the MMC 7.5. Not too shabby.

 

[duragezic]

Cool, I'll have to check it out later tonight. I hope I don't get that fvcking failed to initialize crap man that pissed me off far too many times with MMC 7.0 and MMC 7.1.

During capture, is there other codecs to use? Like can I do mpg1 and 2 like before, but you say you can capture to wmv now too? What about divx?

 

[NeoMadHatter]

i can't seem to find these anywhere. can someone help me out with a link here?

 

[anime]

go to subzerotech.com site-- scroll and search about mmc7.5 news--they have a working and fast d/l able link.

 

[NicColt]

ah man just bad luck.... this thing in win2k was just terrible for me.

if you lick on the screen and press spacebar it kills win2k, freeze or bsod's. performance was laggy.

ATI and WMV codecs are closed formats so they're useless.

In win2k when I closed mmc after recording it hung and have to always reboot. It was unpredictable so I went back to 7.1 and everything is back stable again.

I did like that fact that you can turncate your recordings into 100, 650, 700 chunks and so on.

It seems to be more built for the 8500 series and over and possibly XP. I wouldn't recommend it for win2k with an AIW. It is nice and on the right track and if it works for you then fine but I think it still needs work.

 

[KrispyKremer]

NicColt, surprised to hear you're having problems in Win2k... I'm running my AIW Radeon and haven't had problems, except...

When I installed mmc 7.5, I didn't uninstall the older version (7.1?). This prevented the Gemstar from working right, and I found out the hard way when I program I wanted to record, didn't.

I then installed the newer version of Gemstar and it appears things are working again. Still have to do further testing, but all signs point to a thumb's up.

New interface is slick, and the transparency for the tv tuner is great for surfing.

 

[KrispyKremer]

rbV5, have you played around with the "Compatibility" Properties for the mmc 7.5 version in XP? Somewhere over at Rage3D, I read mention of an improvement when switching over to Win98/ME compatibility?
If your system is running stable now, you may want to disregard, but if you're still doing some tweaking, this may result in greater performance?
Just a thought. Best of luck.

 

[elkinm]

I works prety well but I don't like that you cannot chose between the interface as in some cases the older interface was better. And I wish they kept the quick access buttons in DVD player for full screen as they were very nice, now I always have deal with the big interface which gets in the way on the movie. Also I noticed that the fast forward and reverse is much slower and looks worse then the old DVD players but my CPU usage is around 10-15% and sometimes, rarely, maxes at 20%, even better then PowerDVD XP. But most likely I will use PDVD dew to the simpler and better interface and more features.

 

[Toonces311]

elkinm,
you can switch back to the original skin.
Go Start, Control Panel, ATI Multimedia Center, then select the Skin Tab.

 

[NicColt]

>I didn't uninstall the older version (7.1?). This prevented the Gemstar from working right

that's weird, I uninstalled it and had no problem using Gemstart ... go figure.

BTW is anyone using this in win2k if so click on the screen and press the space bar and see what happens. Let me know if it's only me.

maybe it's time for a clean install with this. but if it works well with XP I may go that route.

 

[rbV5]

<< if you lick on the screen and press spacebar it kills win2k, >>



Stop licking the screen Nic, its just not healthy LOL.

Some things I've noted so far:

*MMC doesn't always properly shut down after clicking it off, I have had to end the process under task mananger on occasion.
*WMP isn't playing my *.mp2 files, no clue here, always worked in the past.
*IBP mpeg-2 capture will drop frames if I breathe wrong, hehe. It mostly works, but...
*It says that *.VCR files are easy to convert to mpeg-2, but I can't find how to do it.

So far, seems like a big step up for ATI's MMC. Hopefully the released product for specific cards/OS's will be even better.

 

[imgod2u]

Does 7.5 work for an ATI TV-Wonder? And also, where can I get it?

 

[rbV5]

<< ATI and WMV codecs are closed formats so they're useless >>



What I've discovered:

The *.vcr codec is not closed in that you can easily convert it to mpeg-2. It's actually a benefit as well in that the *.vcr format is a superset of the mpeg-2 format, using ATI's Digital VCR it allows for variable speed playback from slow motion up to fast motion and it allows you to record subtitles when capturing. Anyone with MMC can view the files natively and to distribute to folks without MMC, you can simply convert it to *.mp2 within the ATI Library application. Right click on the *.vcr file you wish to convert and pick "Export to mpeg-2" and it will make a lossless *.mp2 copy.

but to address your statement on closed formats being useless. Why? The ATI codec has the benefits I listed above which may or may not be useful for you, but the windows media codec is no more useless than say divx or any other codec you use for your final video, and IMHO may be considered far more useful for instance for someone wishing to protect their intellectual property. WMV files are very impressive quality considering the amount of compression, very good for streaming media and other low bandwidth situations if nothing else.

 

[NicColt]

>your statement on closed formats being useless. Why?

well it's fine if your going to only 'view' the recording but most of the times for me anyway, once the recording is finished I can put it directly into my mpeg2 editor and I can't do that with .vcr (unless I conver it) or .wmv and the only thing that will edit wmv is Movie Maker for XP, Gawd help us. and since MMC won't allow you to modify the quality settings on divx it's not worth it. So were left with MPEG1 and 2 and some AVI codecs that are not worth a damm. So if you want to capture video to either edit or render it, it's gota be mpeg2

When I said click on the screen I meant click on the TV window and then spacebar and it kills win2k so not to good.

My opinion is that they went to far to fast, they should have worked on the 7.1 and added the turncate option for example maybe then add the VCR codecs and maybe the one touch recording. But to put that in an entirely new enterface with skins when they still have problems to deal with is just to much.