Picture quality not so great - using PVR150MCE & Sage

[cloudeleven]

I'm using the PVR150MCE with Sage TV 2.1. The picture quality on Live TV is not that great. I can see "little boxes" on the screen (pixellated is the word I'm looking for, I think), even using DVD Standard Play and Best modes. Basically, I can see artifacts around images on screen. Text on screen is also a little blurry.

My PVR150MCE driver version is 2.0.18.22316. I'm using an NVidia DVD Decoder (Version 1.00.58) that also came with the bundle.

My video card is an onboard Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900. Computer specs are Intel P4 w/ HT 3.0 GHz, 512 MB RAM. I'm using DirectX 9.

Oh, I have analog cable and it's plugged directly from the wall into the tv card.

What's causing the so-so picture quality?

Does anyone get great picture quality with this card? If so, what driver, DVD decoder, and video card are you using?

Thanks.

P.S. Also, channel changing is quite slow. It takes at least 2 seconds to change the channel. Is there a way to speed it up?

[kny3twalker]

mostly your video card is causing some of the problem
and if you are getting blocks on the screen
turn up the recording level

second what video render are you using?
VMR9 looks much better than overlay or default aka VMR7 but your video card
the intel integrated thing will not do well with it
I would have to think

update your decoder to the newest 1.0067

and no way to change the delay on the channel changing

what are you displaying the image on
if on a hdtv or pc monitor
you are upscaling a low resolution image
analogue cable is not the greatest source and you are scaling to high res

on my hdtv, analogue cable generally look pretty bad worse than from sageTV
sagetv actually improves the image quality

getting a real video card will most probably help more than you think
either that or a hardware decoder

[CyRex]

I am currently running 2 PVR 150's (1 retail w/ Remote, 1 MCE) and get fine picture quality to an SDTV. I use DVD Standard Play for live action TV and DVD long play for cartoons.

I agree that your first concern should be to upgrade to a better video card. I have a cheap card (ASUS Radeon 7500) and am only using a composite connection right now, but the picture I get is comparable to regular TV.

If you want to sharpen up the image, the first thing to help a little would be to set the Sharpness in Sage (under the capture card setup) to a high value (I have mine at 255).

I use the Sonic DVD decoders running through ffdshow, which improves the picture a great deal. Running only the Sonic decoders results in a fairly blurry picture. Using ffdshow, you can process the mpeg video in real time and do some sharpening and noise reduction. It's a bit tough to set up (have to do some registry editing) but its worth it in the long run.

I'm sure there are plenty of people that get a good picture without ffdshow, so you just have to find what works for you.

As for the remote delay, what type of remote setup do you have? I am using the Hauppauge remote through the PVR-150 and have almost no delay.

Hope that helps....

-Dan

[kny3twalker]

if you use the sonic decoders without ffdshow or DXVA in overlay
teh image could very well be blurry
but generally the sonic decoders are pretty good deinterlacing especially with DVXA enabled
but then no ffdshow with DVXA

[waltc]

I just bought a 150mce, using my old ati 8500dv card and the higher the channel number is, the worse the reception. I really am looking for just getting channel 75 (out of 81) to come in since I do a lot of recording off channel 75.


The drivers that came with 150mce card were the latest (more recent than the ones at hauppauge.com).

Any suggestions? What options should I select? I just downloaded sagetv yesterday.

[ben_95sl1]

oops, this is an old thread....

Sometimes if you record and display with high contrast/brightness, it becomes more noticeable and exagerrates the blockiness problem.

As for overlay vs vmr9, on my ati 8500le, vmr9 looked noticeably worse. So you need to try it to find out.

[stanger89]

If you're getting macroblocking/pixelation with the high recording qualities (like Best) then it sounds like you've got a pretty poor source quality. The first thing I would look at is minimizing the number of splits leading to your TV card. If that doesn't help (or even if it does) you may want to complain to your cable provider that your PQ is bad (tell them its noisy or snowy or something) or you could try a signal/antenna amp.

[waltc]

I think it's cable coming in also.

The weird thing is that I just disconnected the cable from my ati 8500dv and put in on the 150MCE. The pictures came in great with the ATI.

I'll get a new splitter since I need 3 (cable modem, ATI ard and now the 150MCE).

Thanks for the advise all!