[mythtv-users] Playback limiltations [was: Sssssllooooowwww watching TV]

[Chris Palmer]

Bruce Markey wrote
> Cedar McKay wrote:
> ...
> > this is wildly off topic, but if you have worse output with mythtv than 
> > tivo, you have something wrong. Check your encoding prefs, and also your 
> > tv-out solution (hardware and configuration). If you want to continue 
> > the discussion, it should be moved to myth users.
> 
> Cedar, I appreciate you enthusiasm on this in your nine
> points earlier (actually ten but you used "3" twice ;-).
> However, comparing your picture with the picture at your
> friend's house introduces several variable. If you are
> going to suggest that everyone should see MythTV's picture
> as having better quality, I'd like to point out a few
> limitations.

I also want to add in that you can also get wildly different
signal qualities due to cabling.  I was getting a very poor 
picture for low channels (below 16) at first, but was able to 
improve them all by trying a different cable between my tuner 
card and the wall.  I would also think that all cable leading 
from the cable provider to everyone's home is not equal (though, 
I'm sure they strive to do so).

Also, I should add that the overall picture quality (despite 
the jitter) on my MythTV setup is better than my TiVo picture
and that's because I run my TiVo at "Basic" quality to get the
most storage possible.  My MythTV box happens to have a drive
with similar space as my TiVO.  I get hardly any artifacts when
recording on MythTV at a 1Gig/hour quality level, even with fast
movement, where the same content on the TiVo would look extremely 
blocky.  I'm sure this is because of the MPEG4 codec settings I'm
using are that much better than the MPEG2 codec settings used by 
the TiVo for "Basic" quality, but the highest quality on the TiVo
looks superb for all fast-motion content.

-Chris