[mythtv-users] Broke DB upgrading

[Robert Kulagowski]

So, the big day has come, and I finally take the "mysterious" MythTV machine
from the office and haul it downstairs into the family room, and hook it up
to the TV and cable box, fire it up, and say, "Tada!" and start to show off
all the great things this cool new box can do, and justify why I've been
locked in my office for the last few weeks working on it, and I can just
imagine the "ooo's and aahs" I'll hear, and the wife says...

"Howcome the picture's so faded and blury and it looks like.. like an old
movie?"

Aargh!  Can't she appreciate the cool menus, and time-shifting, and the
weather, and the picture gallery?  Nope... just complains about the picture
quality and says, "can't you fix it?" and screws up her face.  <sigh>

So, I spent a couple hours playing with everything I could think of,
including of course, the JKL/jkl keys to tweak the brightness and contrast,
etc. but that doesn't do much (although it helps a bit).  Then I play around
with the myth setup and capture settings, but I already had those as high as
they would go without stuttering.  Next, I ran xawtv and realize that it
really does look quite a bit better than Myth does (and still not as bright
or sharp as live TV, but much closer).  I even played with the right/left
arrow keys to "fine tune" the stations and it turns out that it appears a
bit sharper if I change to about 4 or 5 right arrow key jumps but not a
great deal - maybe 5% or so.  I realize I can set those with
mythfilldatabase --manual.  If I had to describe it in a sentence, I'd say
it looks like a _copy_ of a VHS tape.  Does anyone have any ideas how to
"tweak it up" to improve the quality?  Are other G200/400 people seeing
"great" quality?  Here's my setup:

CVS as of about a week ago, XMLTV as of today
Mandrake 9.0 / 2.4.19 kernel
PIII-800, 512mb, 80gb
Matrox G200 TV with the latest BIOS
Cable In, composite out to TV (S-video not avail on TV)
SB 64 (ENS1371) sound card
Hardware MJPEG
640x480, Decimation 2,2, 70% quality
32k audio either compressed 9 or non compressed (no diff)

fbset -i shows:
mode "800x600-60"
    # D: 40.000 MHz, H: 44.150 kHz, V: 59.582 Hz
    geometry 800 600 800 600 16
    timings 25000 50 40 23 40 16 78
    hsync high
    vsync high
    rgba 5/11,6/5,5/0,0/0
endmode

Frame buffer device information:
    Name        : MATROX
    Address     : 0xf4000000
    Size        : 16773120
    Type        : PACKED PIXELS
    Visual      : TRUECOLOR
    XPanStep    : 8
    YPanStep    : 1
    YWrapStep   : 0
    LineLength  : 1600
    MMIO Address: 0xfeafc000
    MMIO Size   : 16384
    Accelerator : Matrox G200 (Millennium, Mystique)

Ideas anyone?  Tools to use?

Thanks!
JC