[mythtv-users] MythTV vs Tivo and DVR

[Tony Brummett]

On 5/16/06, hondaman <hondaman at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems a lot of people are using standalone boxes these days, Tivo or
> DVR.  Can anyone explain how these work?  Are people watching recorded
> TV when watching live TV, such as MythTV does?  The reason I'm asking is
> with MythTV, there is a noticeable degradation in picture quality while
> watching live TV.  Do the Tivo/DVR people experience this same quality
> issue?

I've had a Tivo series 1 standalone box for quite a while, and I'm in
the process of moving to using my MythTV setup full-time.

Yes, if you do a side-by-side comparison between Tivo's live TV and
real live TV, there is a quality difference, but it's really pretty
small, and you get used to it quickly, especially on a reasonably
sized SDTV (say, 30" or less).  It's the way mpeg compresses the
video.

My MythTV setup produces a picture that's even worse than the Tivo.
But I haven't done any tweaking to the capture settings, brightness,
contrast, etc on my PVR-250 cards.  Some of the quality difference I'm
noticing is probably from the RF noise inside my backend's case which
is a lot worse than the inside of the Tivo I'd imagine, and I haven't
tried putting any shielding in there yet.

-- Tony