[mythtv-users] How to get the best video from mythtv

[David Ellis]

Change your recording profile.

Setup - TV Setup - Recording Profiles

There are 4 profiles:
Default
Low
Live
High

You are able to choose the recording profile used to make the recording when
you schedule it. Tweak the Size 720x480 is nice, and Quality - Your recorded
picture quality will improve.

David

-----Original Message-----
From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org
[mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org] On Behalf Of David Maher
Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2005 11:23 PM
To: mythtv; Mythtv-Users (E-mail)
Subject: [mythtv-users] How to get the best video from mythtv

Firstly I will summarise my setup;
I have seperate frontend and backend PCs, my backend is a P4 3.2ghz, with
2gb of ram. I am running FC4. I have 2 twinhan dvb/t cards and one saa7134
based analogue tuner. I am using 2 x 400gb sata drives with the /video
folder on a logical volume.
The saa7134 card give a fairly ordinary picture, but the dvb cards are great
and they are the ones that are important to me, since the remaining analogue
tv channels will be going digital soon.

My frontend is an Aopen XCcube, which is an intel 865 based p4 3.0ghz pc
with 1gb ram and a 120gb sata drive. The frontend has an Nvidia 5200 agp
card in it. It is also running FC4.

I am gradually improving my mythtv system, but my main problem seems to be
the video quality. Initially I had smooth video, with jagged edges during
playback, but I have improved that dramatically by adding the filters
kerneldeint,denoise3d to the playback section of the frontend tv settings
section. Now the playback for live tv is pretty good, but slightly blurry,
compared to the output from my digital settop box. I still think it could be
better, but it's not bad.

Playback of recorded shows is another matter however. The video is usually
smooth, but it has quite a grainy look to it compared to live tv. Also the
recorded programs, have a noticeable degredation of the halftones, such as
peoples faces, they look like the gamma is wrong or something. I have tried
setting up my recording profiles in the front end for maximum quality, and
have only succeeded in generating huge nuv files (a movie is around 6gb),
with no noticeable improvement on picture quality.

Some of my longer recordings become almost slow motion, with choppy audio
when the are about 30% through playback, it happens when I playback from the
frontend or from the backend, but not when I playback from a windows laptop
using media player. This one seems really weird, because the frontend is on
a 100mhz lan, the files are local on the backend, and the laptop is using my
radio network. I would have thought that if the issue was bandwidth, the
laptop would have had the worst playback.
The is a lot I dont know about video in general ,but I'm wondering whether
I'm better off using svideo for connection to the screen, which by the way
is a Hyundai PD421 Plasma display. I am currently using the dvi output from
the Nvidia card.

So I guess my questons are;
Does any one have a batch of picture quality settings, that they believe are
the best possible?
Is a better picture obtained from DVI, VGA, or from TV out?
Does anyone have any ideas about the slow motion probs during long videos?

Sorry this is so long, I felt I had to get it off my chest

Thanks in advance

David Maher

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