[mythtv-users] Bad TV picture quality on an HDTV

[Brad Templeton]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 09:44:57AM -0700, Matt Grommes wrote:
> I turned Sharpess all the way down and added the denoise3d filter and it 
> looks much better. I haven't tried upping the bit rate yet, hopefully 
> that helps more.
> 
> How does the picture on my Tivo look so good with the same signal and no 
> tweaking for so little money?

Good question.   Probably because the Tivo is designed and tested to
do nothing but tv-out of mpegs it recorded.  That's all it does.

HDTVs tend to come with really bad settings, designed to look crisper or
more contrasty or more saturated than the next guy in the video store.
They have a silly arms race, all setting at poor settings.  Especially
these edge sharpeners they put in.   Sharpening is the last thing you want
to do to an mpeg decode.

And I also presume that in a way, the Tivo's output and the TV-out output
of your video card are both smoothed a bit, to remove mpeg artifacts.