ATI Avivo Video Converter

I originally posted this on a different blog, but thought it was relevant for this blog as well:

This is a great product when it works. The accelerated rendering of AVI to MPEG2 is lightning fast, and is the main reason I purchased this card. HOWEVER, in true ATI fashion, the gui that lets you accomplish this is buggy. Specifically, if I export a movie to AVI from Adobe Premiere Pro and then try to encode it to DVD format (or MPEG2) with the Avivo Video Converter, the application will crash every time you try to move the slider bar to adjust the bitrate. I am putting this in my blog in the hopes that by some miracle someone else will stumble across it who may have found a workaround for this problem. It's driving me crazy. I have this expensive video card virtually sitting idle in my machine because I don't want to encode professional DVD video at a bitrate of 6.0 Mbps - I always use 7.0 Mbps and sometimes 8.0 Mbps. I've been working with ATI on this issue for 6 MONTHS now, and have been throu SIX, count 'em SIX driver revisions. There support is horrific at best to work with - they simply do not listen to what you are telling them. I have submitted trouble tickets, feedback to the catalyst crew, and feature requests. They have all fallen on deaf ears, and their support cannot give me a solution.