[mythtv-users] Video Quality

[Shay - MythTV]

At 11:04 AM 3/11/2004, you wrote:
>And here I was hoping this was a discussion of the best recording or
>transcoding settings...
>
>On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 11:25, Adrian Byng-Clarke wrote:
> > How much of a video quality upgrade does one get by moving from a basic 
> card
> > like that to one of the PVR cards like the Hauppauge PVR 350. For example
> > does the on board Mpeg 2 make that much of a difference? After all 
> can't one
> > just compress the signal after capture (sacrificing time and HD space for
> > $$$) or is there more to it than that.
>
>The advantage of a card like my PVR-250 is that it encodes in hardware
>so the CPU only has to deal with encoded video.  That's far less data.
>With uncompressed video, your CPU is swamped with data.  If your CPU is
>fast enough and your memory and bus bandwidth is high enough, you can
>still get a perfect recording without hardware compression, but anything
>that causes the CPU to get distracted will result in a glitch in the
>recording.
>
> > Perhaps people could post samples of video captured. I don't want to get
> > anyone in trouble - maybe they could just post something off of public TV
> > etc... I just want to get a sense of the quality. For example Tivo's high
> > quality setting looks to my eye exactly like the broadcast signal coming in
> > - there are no artifacts on a TV.  Is this possible with a Linux PVR rig?
> > Also is it only possible with the higher end capture cards?
>
>With a PVR-250, my first recording looked every bit as good as my
>ReplayTV on high quality.  I intend to play with the recording profiles
>a bit to see what I really want.  My guess is that I'll record at a
>fairly high quality and then transcode things offline if we're keeping
>them around for a while.
>
>But yes, Myth can provide results equivalent in quality to a TiVo with
>hardware encoding (or with ATSC broadcasts, which are already encoded,
>but that's another issue).

Really?  I have yet to get my MythTV to record as well as my TiVo.  I have 
a 250 and it just doesn't compare.  Its nice and all, but when things move 
you see glitches.. artifacts.. I don't know the word for it.. its just not 
smooth..

> > Personally I probably won't want to use mythtv to actually watch my
> > recordings. I'm perfectly content saving them to DVD-R and watching them on
> > my DVD player. I'm just wondering if that will look as good as the original
> > broadcast or will it look strange. How successful is mythtv as a digital
> > VCR?
>
>My Myth box is my DVD player.  But if you want to put Myth recordings on
>a DVD, you'll need to record or convert them to MPEG-2.  You'll get the
>best results if you use hardware encoding at DVD size and bit rates to
>begin with (especially since Myth won't convert to MPEG-2, so you would
>have to use an additional conversion program).
>
>--PC
>
>
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