Does ATI HD 650 PCI-E work with SageTV under XP?

[vince100]

Does anyone have experience with ATI HD 650 PCI-E?

VisionTek branded ATI 650 is going at $30 on ebay, I am thinking about buying one. But after a thorough search, I couldn't find any evidence that the QAM function of this card work with Sage under XP.

If anyone had success with it under XP, especially QAM, please share your story.

Thank you.

[MitchSchaft]

Yes, I have the PCI version and it works just fine. I don't know if the PCIe version will do QAM easily, but I have read threads where folks get it to work halfway. Iv'e even read people getting the PCI version to work with QAM. I haven't tried that yet.

[vince100]

Thank you for your input. I may give this a try and report later.

If anyone else has experience with this card, please share.

Thanks.

[vince100]

ok. here is the report:

Visiontek 650 PCI-E QAM worked fine on XP SP3. Found all 123 QAM channels on my comcast cable.

It was necessary to edit the "Sage.properties" file, and add "QAM" to the line "xxxxxx/dshow_tv_type=" to make it work.

Analog tuner was not tested.

One problem though is if "ATI MPEG Codec" was used as decoder and VMR9 as renderer, video stutter would occur. This problem was caused by bug:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924523/en-us

It was also discussed as "frame pulse" problem in these threads:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=793583
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=23110

AFAIK, NO solution exists to fix the problem other than changing to another codec (sage, intervideo, avermedia worked fine but not cyberlink nor purevideo) or changing to another renderer (overlay or EVR).

Final thought -- definitely worth $30.

P.S.

the driver was downloaded from ATI website, not Visiontek's, version 9.10, released on 10/22/2009.