[mythtv-users] Card That Gives The Best Quality Picture?

[Brian Wood]

On Nov 20, 2006, at 2:37 AM, Armblessed wrote:

>
>
> Hey there, guys & gals
>
> I've finally gotten my MythTV box running.  It was an epic battle  
> and with the exception of a stupid question or two (thanks again,  
> Mike! ^_^) , I'm pretty satisfied with the installation process of  
> MythTV.
> Now that I've gotten to use it for a few days, I started to notice  
> the picture quality of the Haupauge PVR-500 card I have.  I can say  
> that it is pretty...well... "meh".   Compared to the picture  
> quality of the
> backups of my DVDs, the picture this card gives for my cable is  
> simply underwhelming.  I've heard alot of people talk bad about the  
> picture quality of the card I've chosen so I know it's not just my  
> cable signal.  That being said, I loved the challenge of this  
> install so much that I want to build another MythTV box but I don't  
> really want to end up with the same less-than-stellar picture  
> quality from my next card I select. Dual tuners aside, What would  
> this group think would be the card that has the best picture  
> quality that could replace the functionality of my PVR-500?
>


As I understand it the PVR-500 is simply a pair of PVR-150s on a  
single card.

I'm using several 150s and and am more or less happy with their  
performance, they do what I would expect from an SD hardware MPEG-2  
encoder.

You might want to look at the encoding parameters for your card(s),  
the defaults are somewhat less than optimal, and certainly less than  
you would get from a DVD rip. Setting them up for better quality will  
no doubt require more storage, but life is full of tradeoffs.