EmFi's Musings

About a year and a half ago I set my folks up with a whole home PVR solution supplied with MythTV. Sooner or later I’ll write a post about the specifics, but this is all the background for this post. There is a combo backend/front end unit, and 3 standalone frontends (one of which is a hacked XBox). A few months ago they got a complete home theatre. HDTV, BluRay player and a Surround Sound system. Which introduced a problem: “How to integrate the MythTV network with the HDTV and still pass the Mom Test?”

In the past we’ve been using cheap nVidea cards that do S-Video out ($10 GeForce 440 MX’s) to connect frontends with TVs. However, the process of selecting an S-Video input on the new home theatre was deemed unnecessarily difficult. The only connection method that made sense was HDMI. There are plenty of Video cards that do HDMI out. Unfortunately, they’re all PCI-e cards, and the only spare PC’s we had available had, at best, an AGP slot. An AGP card that does HDMI out are hard to come by, and those that are available are surprisingly expensive.

After a few hours of research I stumbled upon the fact that DVI and HDMI carried the same video signal, but I couldn’t find any adaptor that integrated an external sound source with a DVI-HDMI adaptor to provide an audio signal through the HDMI cable. Enter ATI and their Avivo technology. Using a proprietary DVI-HDMI adaptor with chipsets supporting Avivo, the resulting HDMI connection would carry audio & video signals.

A local retailer carried a discount VisionTek AGP Radeon 2600 HD Pro for $33. Unfortunately this particular manufacturer doesn’t supply the proprietary DVI-HDMI adaptor despite the hardware supporting it. Which brings us to the title of this post. Acquiring this adaptor has been a struggle. Given that I’m looking for a proprietary part I would rather buy directly from the vendor, then risk buying an incompatible part. It also didn’t hurt that ATI is the least expensive supplier of this part.

My attempts to order from shop.ati.com were thwarted by their inability to ship to Canada. There is a link to shopati.ca on the product page for Canadian customers. But that domain expired and was snapped up by Namespro Solutions who replaced it link farm/parked domain template in June/09 (at the time of writing, that was 8 months ago!). So I decided to try and order over the phone. So far my calls have been redirected 4 times each requiring me to call another number, and I’ve reached a dead end.

1. Number found shop.ati.com 952-646-5888 redirected me to ATI’s office in Markham.
2. Number supplied by CSR at shop.ati.com for ATI’s Canadian HQ(905 882 2620) turned out to be a Fax machine.
3. Listed number for ATI’s Markham Office (905 882 2600), the extension selected by the automated prompter looped me back to the first prompt.
4. Hit 0 to speak to an operator after the auto dispatcher failed to connect me. CSR suggested I call GPU technical support.
5. The CSR at GPU tech support(877-284-1566) could not help me directly. He suggested I try calling yet another number, but he wouldn’t tell me the name of the department that answers the number. He also suggested an unaffiliated internet vendor, should I find the number unhelpful.
6. The nuber given to me by GPU tech support (888-974-6728) was a dead end. I’ve only ever gotten a busy signal in my attempts to call it.
7. The vendor suggested by the GPU tech support worker(svideo.com) didn’t even carry the part I was looking for.

In total, that’s 4 websites, 5 phone calls, 2 dead ends. And I still haven’t found a reasonably priced source for my part.

Update:

Shortly after writing this post I opened a support ticket with AMD as a last ditch effort. Their support website did not inspire hope, unintuitive design, and a warning that claimed it was best viewed with Internet Explorer 5 or 6. A day later they responded stating that the Canadian ATI store was closed for ever, and that my best source of the part was the manufacturer of my specific card. They wanted $30 in shipping for a $5 part. Which was completely unacceptable.

Today AMD reached out to me looking for feed back on my customer support experience. Lets just say that I was less than kind in my responses.