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

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Sat Jul 8 22:39:05 UTC 2006


On Jul 8, 2006, at 4:33 PM, Owen Mehegan wrote:

> 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.

Your friend is correct, but you would not be recording "raw" HD, you  
would be recording HD that's been compressed into MPEG-2, and all you  
would have to do would be to get it recorded onto the disk, the CPU  
doesn't have much to do with this process.

Playing it back is another issue though, I suspect you would not have  
enough horsepower to playback HD without the help of XvMC or the like.

>
> 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 :-)

I use PVR-150s and find the quality of SD material adequate for  
display on a 32" LCD, and I'm probably pickier than most. Plus the  
added advantage of probably the best-supported cards in the Myth world.


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