TV output quality.. opinions?

[salsbst]

My guess is that this is a limitation of the Hauppauge drivers and that Frey wouldn't really be able to help.

[justme]

I don't know Kevinkiller's WinTVCap app could address each of 4 cards for a specific recording. It also had prefilter settings that could be set per each individual recording. From what I've read of his posts it seems the settings can be directly manipulated from the PVR card's chip. It means slightly bypassing the drivers but from the little I understand it should be able to be done.

[craiger316]

I've been doing some experimenting with a few mini-itx boards and the PVR-250.

Through WinTV2K watching live tv, solid colours appear dithered, basically imagine you had a picture of a blue wall with a flash light pointed at it. Then load that image into Photoshop and reduce the palette to 256 colours. You would see a weird speckling and ringing effect as the intensity of the flash light fell off as you looked further out from the centre.

After applying some of the tweaks described in this thread, I managed to get SageTV to display live tv without as much dithering, but still I believe it could be better. Could someone post a screen capture of a few live video screens, this way I can judge what clarity I should expect to be getting.

My setup is
[Sat. Receiver] ==s-video==> [PVR-250]
[tv-out onboard]==s-video==>[TV]

Thanks,

Craig.

[craiger316]

Played around with the colour settings for my onboard video as suggested by narflex and it improved the quality quite a bit. The way I calibrated it was to have sage running with it's main screen showing. If you look at the background of the main screen it is actually a spherical gradient, basically I launched the onboard video properties and adjusted the brightness/gamma/contrast to make the gradient blend as nicely as possible. Then I launched liveTV and noticed the increased quality.

I can't seem to get the registry hacks to work on my system for the decoder, seems as though when I do this my video feed turns into a bunch of green blocks when I fire up Sage or WinTV. Should I upgrade to DX9 or something?

I am very pleased though, I was running a via C3 800 but because I was housing it out in the open, the internal fan was grateing on my nerves as it built up dust and got noisy. Swapped it out and replaced it with a VIA 533 fanless and was pleased to see that the Haupauge lived up to it's reputation of letting your CPU rest easy while it is doing it's thing.

The only drawback, some of my Mame roms aren't running as smoothly, but hey, just so long as Exciting Hour works, I'm all good

Craig.

[johnnysnap]

I'm trying to adjust the following reg setting but have no custom directory under Intervideo?
Did I miss something in the install? I have a Common but no custom.
Also, where do I set the Video Proc Amp settings under "Video Capture Settings? I cant seem to find that either.
HKLM\Software\Intervideo\Custom\Hauppauge\VideoDec\Dxva
Thanks
Anything else I can do to improve pic quality?

[johnnysnap]

Nevermind about the VideoProc Amp settings.... Found them

[craiger316]

Originally posted by johnnysnap
I'm trying to adjust the following reg setting but have no custom directory under Intervideo?
Did I miss something in the install? I have a Common but no custom.
HKLM\Software\Intervideo\Custom\Hauppauge\VideoDec\Dxva
Thanks
Anything else I can do to improve pic quality?

Hey johnny, you only get those reg settings after you install the updated mpeg decoder from the Hauppauge site. I believe you have to uninstall the version you had installed from the CDROM first before installing the updated ones.

http://www.hauppauge.com/html/sw_pvr_selector.htm

Craig.