[mythtv-users] PVR-250 and Lack of Color Depth

Andrew Dodd atd7 at cornell.edu
Wed Feb 25 11:04:59 EST 2004


Quoting "Rolando J. Nieves" <rjnieves at earthlink.net>:

> Hello, all,
> 
> I've been using my Myth box for about a couple of months now and for the
> most part I'm very pleased. The only problem I've not been able to lick is
> the fact that my PVR-250 (or my GFFX5200 TV-out) can't seem to handle color
> depth well. Whenever I record series that are mostly darker-than-usual
> lighting (Enterprise, 24, CSI) I see the type of color "banding" that I
> used
> to have with my first couple of 3D accelerator cards (not to be confused
> with the green bands most other people have been talking about). The
> "banding" was (at least in the 3D accelerator case) due to lack of color
> depth: 16 vs. 32 bits (remember the whole 3Dfx vs. NVidia fiasco?). I don't
> know enough about the PVR-250 to say that color depth is my problem but the
> symptoms do look similar. I've tried to play around with picture controls
> (contrast/brightness to try and increase the difference between color
> tones)
> to no avail. BTW I've checked that the signal coming from my sattellite box
> looks richer than the PVR-250 output. I can also certify my X server is
> running at 24-bit depth.
> 
> Does anyone know if there are any settings I'm missing regarding the
> PVR-250? Am I barking up the wrong tree by chasing a color depth issue?
> Could it be the NVidia TV encoder?
First, try playing back to a monitor, to eliminate or confirm the possibility
that it might be TV output related.

If possible, try playing back the video on another device too.

Also attempt bumping up the bitrate to see if that makes a difference.  MPEG
compression depends on quantization (essentially reducing the data precision),
and so a reduced bitrate might cause such a problem.

Also, were you playing with the contrast/brightness of playback or of recording?
 Myth has settings for both.



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