Why won't ATI/AMD fix this!!

People buy ATI video hardware only to find claims of software support are a fraud.

A fresh install of the latest USB Wonder 2.0 drivers, Catalyst 7.1, and MultimediaCenter 9.16 yields completely unwatchable video from the tuner.

Keep in mind that my Fusion HDTV digital tuner displays a FANTASTIC picture, with full AVIVO deinterlacing in action for HD and SD broadcasts. Playing a recorded mpeg file in WMP11 using Nvidia Purevideo decoder to control the video hardware also yields a FANTASTICALLY deinterlaced picture.

ATI MMC's live TV view is not deinterlaced and looks HORRIBLE. If you start a recording, deinterlacing kicks in but the picture still looks HORRIBLE for some reason. Insanely, there are NO settings in the software to control DxVA hardware acceleration. Play the same recorded file in WMP 11 and the picture looks FANTASTIC!!!

MMC is the most eggregiously buggy software ever but one is forced to use it because it also has the best realtime mpeg capture encoding available (goes up to a lossless 15Mbs).

In addition to the bugs, critical features that existed in previous version of MMC have been removed.

Why do sites like Toms Hardware pump up technology architectures (AVIVO) and chip hardware (Theater 200, 550, 650) but completely avoid the fact that companies never write software necessary to exploit those architectures and chips?

More problems:

- Recorded files are saved with permissions NOT inherited from the capture folder. They can not be read by a remote PC unless copied to a new file.

- Recorded filename has the correct channel and time for the first recording but subsequent recordings do not get a new name, even if the channel is changed.

- Setup menu comes up on the secondary display, not the display that has the video and controller. This is inexcusable because, using AVIVO Theater mode, playing video fills the second display and the setup menu is hidden.

Rolling back to MMC 9.08 fixes almost all the problems I have mentioned but drops a few useful features.

One thing is completely clear: Nobody involved in the specification, writing, or QA of MMC software has any experience with video capture software. The whole job is probably a speced out to the cheapest possible outsourcing house. Certainly no one involved has ever tried to use MMC in anything approaching a real-life situation.