[mythtv-users] Video quality?

[Piers Kittel]

Hello,

I've been using MythTV full time for 2 years, I really like it a lot  
and kudos to the devs.  I've always had a small problem with MythTV,  
but I always ignored it, thinking that it was an inherent problem of  
using computers to watch TV.  If you took 2 identical TVs, one  
connected to a digital input, such as a Freeview (UK DVB-T) box, and  
another connected to a computer connected to an identical Freeview  
box and asked me which was showing the output from a Freeview box,  
and which was from MythTV.  I could tell you in a second just from  
watching the video output.  What I would see is very very slight  
jerking in between frames - it's not totally smooth, I can see very  
slight jumps when it transitions in between frames.  It's very faint  
but it's there.  I always accepted this as a limitation of using  
computers to process TV pictures. I've seen the exact same on maybe 8  
different frontends (current and ones I've used in the past, all on a  
very diverse hardware platforms and diverse operating systems and  
connected to either computer monitors or plain vanilla TVs), and my  
friend's frontends.

Until recently.  I was having problems with MythTV on my Mac Mini,  
sometimes the frontend would crash (currently trying to troubleshoot,  
that's for another story).  So I'd connect to my server via NFS, find  
out which video file to use, and use VLC to play back the video.   
Looks exactly the same as playback from the frontend, until I enable  
linear de-interlace.  Wow, the quality is stunning, it's now totally  
smooth, I'm now unable to tell the difference between live broadcast  
and a MythTV recording - so much that I find it to be very weird to  
watch as I'm not used to such smoothness - I get the exact same  
feeling when I watch live broadcast that's not via MythTV.

The kicker is that I do have linear de-interlace already enabled on  
all of my frontends so... why aren't I seeing the best quality?  Am I  
doing something wrong?

Thanks for your time!

Regards - Piers