ATI TV WONDER capture quality

[What Happend]

I have a ATI TV Wonder Pro Remote control eddition. I understand that it doesn't have a Hardware MPEG2 Encoder. The capture quality of beyond tv is terrible with this card. The image is way over bright and too much contrast. The colors are very dull. I can't find settings to adjust brightness/contrast/gamma of the captured videos. I am going to be playing the MPEGS via a UPNP Media player (Can't addjust the video on playback).

I have been using ATI MMC 9.03 and the picture quality for MPEG2 is great. It rivals my set top DVD recorder which has a great 4hr per DVD mode (1.1G / hour). With MMC ATI I use VBR at 704x480 resoution and capture interlaced since I am going to be watch on my tv. I capture audio at 48K Hz stereo.

I have tried making my own capture settings and using all the built in ones and my caputures 2.2 Gig /hour and look terrible.

What am I doing wrong? Is the software MPEG encoder in Beyond this bad? It is more like a setting issue with the ATI TV wonder. Given a enought bandwidth the MPEG encoder should look like the source.

[Bilar Crais]

I had an ATI AIW, and I agree with you...captures in MMC looked fantastic.
I bought BTV over a year ago to use with my AIW 8500, and the caps were not nearly as good as with ATI's native software. Since then, BTV 3.5 has upgraded to a Cyberlink encoder which has the potential to give superior results compared to the old encoder, at the expense of higher CPU usage. Such are the demands of this new encoder that it doesn't perform well in certain situations with Athlon processors. At last report, SnapStream was consulting with Cyberlink to optimize the encoder for BTV.

In the meantime, have you tried the old "SnapStream Basic" encoder instead of the default? Before I bought a hardware encoder card, I used the Basic encoder for several months...results were pretty good overall, except for high motion scenes which were a bit blocky. I doubt you will be able to obtain the same level of quality that you achieve with MMC, which is of course optimized for the ATI hardware. If you can't live without BTV (like me), I'd suggest upgrading to a Hauppauge H/W encoding tuner such as the '150, which can be had for as little as $73.00. Purchasing a PVR-250 was the best money I've ever spent for computer hardware.

You can adjust your encoding color settings in the WebAdmin by going to settings/audio and video inputs/edit settings/editing a video source. Tick the pulldown menu that says "show more settings." This will reveal the color controls, which appear towards the bottom of the page. You can adjust brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation to your taste.

If you want, you can experiment with encoder options in settings/recording perferences/mpeg2 encoder.