[mythtv-users] Less than stellar video

Jarod Wilson jcw at wilsonet.com
Fri Nov 12 23:15:52 UTC 2004


On Friday 12 November 2004 14:49, Shawn wrote:
> Don't worry, I'm starting emergency remedial grammar class tomorrow.

Heh... :-)

> On Fri, 2004-11-12 at 16:35 -0600, Shawn wrote:
> > Keep in mind that encoded video won't ever be quite as good as straight
> > off the cable. It's encoded. Having said that...

Important to note that not only is it encoded, its encoded with a lossy codec. 
And AVerMedia uses notoriously crappy quality tuners (I have 2 different AVer 
cards, they're not as good as my Hauppauge cards). They seem to need much 
stronger, cleaner signals than other cards.

Ah, just thought of something else... He said it looks equally bad in xawtv, 
which means it is NOT the encoding process that makes the video look bad, 
since that's straight up raw video overlay.

> > PVR 350's SVIDEO out is superior by far to NVIDIAs SVIDEO out.

That has to be quantified though, and is also somewhat subjective. This 
statement only applies to TV. I have a 350, and while it is slightly better 
than nVidia SVideo out, it definitely isn't superior by far. Quality seems to 
vary quite a bit from one nVidia card to another, so I believe a good nVidia 
card is pretty close in quality to a 350, especially with the flicker filter 
stuff added in the 6xxx drivers. If you're concerned about anything else, 
like DVD rip playback, visualizations in MythMusic, etc., then the 350 sorta 
sucks. For me, the ever-so-slight sharpness improvement with the 350 isn't 
worth it over the other features an nVidia card provides. I have zero 
complaints about the output from any of my current nVidia cards.

> > What you can be fairly confident of, though, is that it's mostly not the
> > recording.

My money is on another poor AVer tuner...

> > This scared me at first when setting up myth with my PVR-250, 
> > until I got a HDTV and starting using Y Pr Pr off my SVGA from the video
> > card. So far I could only find a modeline for 480p, but hey, it's
> > alright.

480p is actually more optimal for playback of PVR-250 streams than any other 
HDTV mode anyhow. I watch all my standard-def stuff in my 480p mode, and only 
flip to 1080i for the high-def stuff.

> > I guess I would recommend getting the PVR-350. You can always use two
> > tuners.

I'd see what can be done to clean up the signal a bit first, since it may not 
be the output side of things at fault here. Remove any splitters, use quality 
cable, etc., see if it gets any better. Then look at a Hauppauge card (maybe 
a PVR-250 and keep using the FX for output if you plan to do much movie 
watching, PVR-350 and use its output if you only care about TV).

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE
jcw at wilsonet.com

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