Why is my quality so much worse than DVB web scheduler?

[Madz]

Hi, I'm trialling SageTV and with SageMC I find it to be excellent. However...

I have quite bad digital reception here, and my recordings made with several different media center products have suffered from skipping and digital artifacts to various degrees throughout the recordings.

SageTV doesn't skip/jump as badly as MediaPortal did, though perhaps more frequently. Before I tried SageTV though, I tried DVB WebScheduler (the free version). Amazingly it records perfectly and seems oblivious to the poor reception. It leaves me a bit stuck as I like the SageTV interface better but at the end of the day, the quality of the recordings are the most important thing.

My question is why should there be such a difference? I have three identical tuners in the same PC, all running off the same aerial connection on the same splitter, all recording dvb-t digital signal. I did tests recording the same channel at the same time, one using SageTV and one using DVB WebScheduler (WS), the WS recording played back (in SageTV) perfectly, while the SageTV one broke down every few minutes for a second.

All I can think of is the difference is due to the filter used to record the digital tv stream?? Not knowing much about these, I don't know if that's a plausible explanation or not?? The only other difference is WS is recording as DVR-MS (I think using the MS stream buffer engine), where SageTV is recording as mpeg2.

I guess what I'm really hoping to find is a way to improve the SageTV recording quality, that way I can get rid of WS. Otherwise I'm going to have to try and replace the SageTV back-end with WS, which will be complicated, no doubt.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Mick