<br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>So is there any way to get around this? I just raised my recording birate to<br>
6400, peak 9000 and am watching a hockey game and I see no difference. I<br>recorded a movie at the same bitrate but haven't watched it yet.<br><br>What's a better card?</blockquote><div><br><br>There really isn't any way to get around it that I know of - the PVR series are about as good as it gets for a combined tuner/MPEG encoder card. There are, however, some other routes to go for improved video quality:
<br><br>1) Get an HD capture card. You'll likely only be able to get broadcast network programming - but you'll be amazed how many things you find that suddenly become worth watching in HD. Personally, I'd rather watch crap programming in HD than quality NTSC programing.
<br><br>2) Get a digital cable/sat box and record off its s-video output using your PVR-500. Analog cable inherently gives you a noisy video signal, and MPEG-2 compression does not handle noisy input well. For the best picture quality possible from a PVR card, feed it downscaled HD programming from the s-video port of an HD cable/sat box.
<br><br>3) Watch football live (j/k, please! don't do this. acute beer commercial poisoning is likely to occur if you try this)<br><br><br></div><br></div><br>