[mythtv-users] What to do for better TV-out

Rich West Rich.West at wesmo.com
Sat Jan 13 18:01:00 UTC 2007


Bart Coninckx wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been building a MythTV 0.20 box for a good friend of mine, who recently 
> purchased a huge Pioneer plasma TV.
>
> Since the plasma TV has a VGA input, I decided to use that for sending the 
> signal to the TV. Good idea it seems, because the MythTV menus show 
> splendidly.
>
> After a lot of browsing and reading, I decided to use a PVR-350 card for TV 
> reception. Unfortunately, when we watch TV, the picture provided by the 
> Mythbox is about half the quality of the normal TV picture on the plasma TV. 
>
> Obviously this is a big turn-off for my mate as far as using MythTV is 
> concerned. 
>
> Now I would like to check with you guys if there's any way to improve the 
> picture quality drastically. One thing I was thinking of, is using the 
> PVR-350's S-video out. Is there any way I could get close to the normal 
> picture quality of the plasma TV? I'm even prepared to buy another card ...

I'm bumping in to the same problem with our HD set.  You'd be better off 
trying the S-Video interface for watching normal TV.  Displaying PVR 
grabbed video on an HD set (which the Plasma that you are tinkering with 
surely is) is going to look awful.  It's actually NOT the video card, 
but is it the video itself.

Long story short: the VGA is a progressive input to the TV that allows 
for high resolution and the display of essentially HD video directly.  
S-Video is an interlaced input which is not capable of displaying HD.

I'm going to take a guess here: "normal TV picture", as you referred to 
it, is probably either a direct coax connection from the cable company 
or, at best, an S-Video connection out of a cable company's set-top-box 
to the tv.  If that is indeed the case, then I think the progressive vs. 
interlaced display might be the source of your problem.

Another thing that was suggested to me was to adjust the live tv picture 
(or recorded programs picture) while watching.  Hit "M" (or whatever you 
assigned your menu to) and go through each of the on screen menus.  
There's one there which allows you to set it to 4:3 interlaced.  It 
didn't help me, but it might help you...

-Rich


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