[mythtv-users] Card That Gives The Best Quality Picture?

[Brian Wood]

On Nov 20, 2006, at 9:05 AM, tom roth wrote:

> You are aware that when looking "Live TV" in mythtv you are  
> actually watching a recording ?
> Therefore the chosen recording parameters for the "Live TV" profile  
> influence the quality you see in Live TV under mythtv.
> If you want to check what your card is capable of you can try:  
> mplayer <devicename>.
> Hope that helps.
>
> tom
>

Precisely what I meant.

But even looking at the output of the card with mplayer you are  
watching an "encoding", so factors such as resolution, bitrate etc.  
will affect what you see. How you are de-coding the mpeg stream also  
makes a big difference, as does de-interlace or the lack thereof.

And of course how you are feeding your TV set makes a big difference  
as well, there is a huge difference between using a composite TV-Out  
and using the DVI or the VGA output. Also if and how your TV is  
scaling the picture will make a difference.

There is no such thing as a "Live" picture when using PVR 150/500  
cards as they only output mpeg streams, unlike a straight frame- 
grabber. MPEG-compressed video will always be somewhat less good than  
"live" video, but the difference can be made small enough to not  
bother most people.