[mythtv-users] Re: Hardware MPEG2 vs bt878

[Nick]

On 29/09/05, Baudouin, Andrew <andrew.baudouin at awc-inc.com> wrote:
> Actually, believe it or not...
>
> All things equal a framegrabber will result in superior quality on-disk.
> The problem lies with the quality of the tuner on the cheap framegrabbers.
> It's clearly below that of the more expensive hardware cards.
>
> To preserve quality ideally you'd like to have the raw video on disk and
> compress it as you see fit rather than go straight into MPEG2.

In the 'good old days' (i.e. prior to 2004) I was using a PCI WinTV
and VirtualDub to capture raw video in HuffYUV format, before editing
and then exporting to MPEG2 or DivX (which would take a *long* time).
The quality was pretty good for the price of the card and the amount
of video I captured with it over the years. The problem arose because
I was left with 10GB of data for a 20 minute show which severely
limited the amount I could record, esp when scheduling recordings.

The quality I get now from my PVR-350 card recording from
S-Vid/Composite video in is, for all intents and purposes, almost the
same as the output from my cable box itself (viewing on a Standard Def
Sony Wega). Of course, using DVB is a clear head and shoulders above
the PVR-350 in terms of quality, but that's because the transmitted
video is already encoded from clean source so has an inherent
advantage.

As the OP has stated, the framegrabber will be used with a couple of
other hardware cards, so if it's not going to be used often, and disk
space is not an issue, nor transcoding, then I'd say have a go if
you've already got the card lying around.

Nick