It's been a while since I've posted, but have learned a lot in the past few weeks. I thought I'd relay what I found in hopes to help others, but as of yet I have not fully got everything working the way I like it...
My setup (mileage may vary based on setup it seems)
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ASUS P2B v1.02
Celeron 466MHz
ASUS v3400TNT/16MB/TV (SDRAM, not SGRAM)
WinXP Professional
ISA 56k modem
No other cards, no multimedia
Composite versus S-Video?
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I have heard a few rumors on some other forums that indicate there is a difference in the way the Composite input is detected versus the SVIDEO input. Can anyone shed any light on this? I use the Composite input, which I imagine most people do. I found a converter at Radio Shack for $20 (!!!), and couldn't bring myself to spending that much money. But some have indicated that booting WinXP with the SVIDEO connection live will cause the nVidia WDM drivers to properly detect and enable the capture device? I do not know how the ACPI/StandardPC may interact with this rumor either.
If anyone can shed light on the connector differences, it would be most appreciated.
ACPI versus Standard PC
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These are ultimately methods that WinXP uses to manage resources and power-saving features of your PC. ACPI gives WinXP the most flexability. Standard PC gives it the least (and you the most).
ACPI allows WinXP to assign/reassign all IRQ's as it sees fit, no matter what your BIOS has configured them for. WinXP for some reason likes to share every device on a single IRQ, which seems to be the crux of the video-capture problem.
To date, I have had absolutely no progress on any solution on my ACPI-mode WinXP partition. But the hard drives power down and the system will go into sleep mode just fine. I have another partition which I installed WinXP in "Standard PC" mode, and did finally get DVCR working, but at a wimpy 5 or so frames per second rate. I also got ASUS LIVE v4.6r (started with 4.6b2 and worked my way up with no problems) working flawlessly. Unfortunately, absolutely no power-management features work. Hard drives don't spin down, the system does not go into sleep mode (or hibernate). In fact, I cannot even manually put the system into standby/sleep mode. It only offers "Hibernate, Off, Restart." Manually, all three work fine, except it gives the great "It is now safe to turn off your computer" rather than shutting off my ATX power supply.

I have tried several regedit mods suggested in other forums to tell WinXP to actually shut off the ATX supply, but it just won't do it on a Standard PC installation.
Installing ASUS LIVE on an ACPI installation will cause your system to freeze-up during boot when the ACPI mode changes all the IRQs around and tries to enable the video capture device. Major conflicts and WinXP just stops.
WinXP has all sorts of rules that is uses to determine whether or not your system and BIOS support ACPI. If everything goes great, it installs WinXP with ACPI support. If not, it installs what is calls "Standard PC" support. You can actually go through and act like you are going to reinstall WinXP on top of the existing partition (boot from the WinXP disc, etc), but when it says "press F6 if you need to install 3rd party drivers," hit F5 (Not F6!) and let it keep doing its thing. Eventually, it should pop up a little scroll window where you can choose which HAL (hardware abstraction layer) you want to use. APCI or Standard PC (Don't install "UniProcessor ACPI" unless you are running a single processor on a dual-processor mainboard! There is another called "Advanced Power and Control Interface (ACPI)" that is the one you want). Windows will go through and basically re-install the OS. I have not performed extensive testing, but it seems to keep all your apps in place, but you loose any WindowsUpdate patches and it looks like it hosed up my Office2000 installation. All others seem to be okay so far.
Others have indicated that you can just "Update Driver.." on the ACPI in the device manager -- this will not work on all systems! For some it will work, for others it will probably cause your system to stop booting up.
Intel Application Accelerator?
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I did get a response from ASUS that requested me to install the Intel Application Accelerator. Unfortunately, this makes me wonder if ASUS reads their email -- the IAA does not support the 440BX chipset, which is what the P2B mainboard uses.
Reading a little about IAA (on intel's website), it is basically a chipset-optimized I/O driver, to apparently speed up disk or bus I/O. Not sure if ASUS was reaching on that one or if anyone has actually seen IAA fix their problem(s).
If you've used IAA and it actually fixed your problem, please us know!
Compatiblity Mode?
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I recently received a USB Scanner from my father-in-law who couldn't get it working under WinXP. I looked online and got the WinXP drivers, and sure enough, no success. I kept playing with it though, and went into the application properties and set it to "Run this program as .. Win2000" and boom, the scanner now works.
I wonder if something similar can be done at a driver level? or with the video capture software?
If you have any information about such modes with drivers, please let us know!!
Summary
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Well, that's about all I've got for today. Hopefully this will help spark more testing and as a team we can work these issues out for all card types in WinXP.
I do make one request. Those that post, please document the following in at least one of your posts (not necessarily every time, unless always applicable):
- mainboard type (manf, model, etc) and rev if you know it
- video card type (and rev if you know it)
- drivers (many already list drivers, but nothing else)
thanks!
dane walther
(I can also be reached with an underscore between first and last name, @ hotmail.com)