ATI Avivo/MMC software does not work

I can't believe I was sucked into buying a piece of hardware based on vaporware marketing claims for software that does not exist in a working form.

Here is what I installed on a fresh XP SP2 installation:

- motherboard drivers (nforce4 ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe)
- ATI display drivers and CCC (cat6.6) for x1900XT
- driver for USB 2.0 Wonder
- driver for t550 tuner card
- MMC 9.14 software package

Results trying to watch/record TV from the two tuner cards on various restart attempts:

- MMC randomly crashes when changing channels on the USB tuner
- USB tuner displays a green screen and no audio until S-video input is selected and then tuner is selected again
- USB tuner has video but no audio until restarted
- USB tuner displays choppy video and/or choppy audio
- t550 tuner has audio but black video until a recording is started, then video is comes back.
- Recording AVI from t550 is choppy and ends up at 34fps even though config is set at 29.97 (VirtualDub records same AVI format perfectly)
- Video display with t550 active is extremely poor (pixelated) and USB is not much better. Mpeg playback in WMP is far superior.

Results running the supposedly hardware accelerated AVIVO Video Converter:
- It is NOT hardware accelerated. Mpeg2 encoding time is slower than TMPGEnc on X2 4800+ with both cores are pegged at 100%.

Results playing HDTV capture files:
- AVIVO does NOT support playback of industry standard transport stream files without installation of Nvidia PureVideo decoder package. There is no equivelent software available from ATI (probably a good thing considering that it would not work).

While limited to control of the USB tuner, MMC 9.08 works absolutely flawlessly on the same hardware. This demonstrates that the new software generation is a complete marketing con-job with NO actual engineering/QA effort put in to it.

And don't even get me started on the fact that claims of HDR+AA were a complete lie since no game developers will ever jump through the hoops necessary to get that working.