[mythtv-users] Improving video quality - new tuner or HD cable box?

[Owen Mehegan]

I have a newly-constructed Myth system in which basically everything  
is working the way I want it to. My only problem at this point is  
that the video quality isn't very good. I'm connecting to a 34" Sony  
HDTV (CRT). I'm using an Nvidia card with DVI out to the HDMI in on  
the TV, and an ATI TV Wonder VE tuner card. I have a regular, non-HD  
digital cable box. I'm feeding video to the system over composite  
input to the tuner card and changing channels over the serial port.

The main problem I have with video quality is that the color is a  
little washed out, there's a bit of motion blue, but mainly anything  
in the picture that's white tends to have a rainbow, shimmery  
quality. It has been suggested to me that this is a product of the D/ 
A/D conversion of digital cable/analog composite cable/digitized  
mythtv. It has also been suggested that my crappy tuner card isn't  
good enough for this nice TV.

I don't really care about HD from a content perspective, but I figure  
that one of my options is to upgrade to an HD cable box and pull  
video off it using Firewire. I'm not sure if my system is powerful  
enough to deal with that though; I have a Celeron D 2.13 ghz  
processor, 1G memory, and two 160G EIDE drives in a software RAID 1.  
My friend thinks this processor won't be fast enough to record and  
play back raw HD at the same time.

I guess my other option is to just get a better tuner card. Maybe a  
PVR-150? 250? 500? I don't really know anything about the Hauppage  
cards.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated :-)
--
owen at nerdnetworks.org (Owen B. Mehegan)
'i am not a mathametician or computer programer ,but i do have  
extremely advanced thoughts  that i believe will help the human race'