Sage TV Shootout: E-home vs. Hauppage PVR-250

[JPW]

Well, I was curious and bought one of the e-home cards just a few days after I bought my first PVR-250. I am using the SageTV 1.4 demo. I am still trying to see what optimal performance looks like with SageTV before I buy.

Anyway, the results were telling. Personally, I think you get what you pay for here. The picture quality was not nearly as good as with the PVR-250. I have a home theater with a projector and a 106" 16:9 screen. Obviously this blows up any artifacts or loss of detail. The PVR-250 won hands down the most noticable area was text. Even with the sharpness turned way down you could see a pixelization with text. My PVR-250 doesn't exhibit this with the same compression. On a smaller screen or TV the difference is probably not as dramatic. As for me this card goes back from whence it came and my PVR-250 is going back in

[edmc]

Thanks for posting your experiment results, JPW. I've been wondering the same thing. While most have had no success with mixing PVR-250s/350s with differing Tuner chips (i.e. -15 and -16), I've somehow been getting by in my setup. Loading the drivers was a challenge, but all has worked for many months. But I was interested in a 3rd tuner and didn't want to press my luck and add another PVR-250 of either version.

One question: I've noticed dramatic improvements in picture quality by playing around with the Capture Settings on the PVR-250s. Turning Sharpness all the way down and backing off on Contrast and Saturation seem to have not only made the picture more pleasing but dramatically reduced the MPEG-2 Encoding artifacts.

I understand some (or all) of the capture settings are not configurable thru SageTV yet. So (how) did you accomplish this? As my experience with the PVR-250s suggests, I would expect the quality of the captures on the E-Home cards to be highly dependent upon such settings.

[stanger89]

What quality are you recording at on the 250? The E-home is stuck at ~2Gb/hr so your comparison may not tell the whole story.

[SHS]

Multiple -15 and -16 one system is being addrees rigth now

[TunaBoo]

I would not trust the drivers/quality of any ATI product, so I will definately stick with the PVRs for the near future.

[mlbdude]

Originally posted by stanger89
What quality are you recording at on the 250? The E-home is stuck at ~2Gb/hr so your comparison may not tell the whole story.

I agree. I would like to see you compare these both a 2 GB per hour. Then we would know if it is even worth waiting for Sage to support the card or not.

[JPW]

My apologies. I should have written in more detail but I was tired after work and wanted to get something into the forum.

Anyway, I have used the 2GB compression with the PVR250 ever since I got it. I haven't even tried other settings since it was such an improvement over my HDTV capture card's ability to record SDTV. The PVR-250 out of the box has some of the craziest default video settings I have ever seen. Contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness, etc., are all pretty off. I spent a considerable amount of time getting these right and the posts here on the forum really helped. My settings are only slightly off when compared to the consensus of others. In contrast the ATI e-home wasn't that bad as-is. The sharpness was way too high but the saturation looked accurate to me. The contrast did need to be pulled back a bit as well as the brightness but not as drastic as the pvr250.

If you are viewing on a 19" monitor from a few feet back then the difference between the two cards will probably not strike you. In my case the large screen and projector show every little flaw in picture detail. There was simply no contest between the two. The pvr-250 was far and away the better card when comparing picture quality at the 2GB compression setting.

The true test came when I started watching basketball. As you might imagine this is a demanding task on these cards, constant panning mixed with text. The pvr-250 does a job about as well as can be expected. The text displays very little stairstepping (pixelization) and you can even make about some good detail with the players. In comparison I found the E-home card picture to do an awful job with text. It was almost like you could see these transparent lines through the text itself. These were clearly artifacts. They were slight but again on my big screen very noticable. Also, the player detail was very different. The bodies of the players seemed less defined. You could not make out the details very well with the numbers on the jerseys and such. The pvr250 does a very good job of allowing you to see this detail.

Ultimately, I wish everything just went the way of HDTV and we wouldn't have so many issues like this but until that time I guess we have to do what we can to compromise with SDTV. Needless to say my ATI E-home goes back to newegg (by the way, best place to buy ever) and my pvr250 is here to stay.

[mlbdude]

Thanks for the update JPW. Do you know if both cards were doing VBR? I think the 2GB setting with the 250 does by default. Not that it would make a huge difference but the more info the better .

[JPW]

Uh oh...glad I didn't return it just yet. What is VBR and how do I enable it? First I've heard of it...still a newbie

[AJ Bertelson]

Thanks for the update JPW, this is pretty much what I was looking for.

Now lets see what happens in the differences between VBR and VMR9, sounds like the e-home wonder was working in VMR9 mode.

[mlbdude]

VMR9 would not effect the encoder but VBR could just a bit. Since Sage does not support it yet though you won't be able to change it. Not sure how you can tell what it is doing by default.

[gplasky]

Can't you tell from the properties file how your qualities are setup? I know from the Support site-Customizations you can get this line:

Example for HQ DVD.
seeker/recording_qualities/MyDVD=MyDVD,224,48000,6000000
mmc/python2_encoding/MyDVD=videobitrate=4500000|width=720|height=480|audiobitrate=224|vbr=1|peakvideobitrate=6000000

Which to me with a setting of vbr=1 you can do vbr. So looking in properties you should be able to tell from the quality you're doing what it is set to.

Gerry

[mlbdude]

I can tell for the 250, but from what I am told Sage has no control over the quality of the E-Homes encoding so those values are probably not being used.

[stanger89]

Thanks JPW, I wasn't doubting your results, just wanted to make sure you weren't comparing 2Gb/hr to 5.6Gb/hr. This is exactly the kind of information I think we were looking for, even if the results weren't.

[JPW]

Originally posted by AJ Bertelson
Thanks for the update JPW, this is pretty much what I was looking for.

Now lets see what happens in the differences between VBR and VMR9, sounds like the e-home wonder was working in VMR9 mode.

I'm still confused here. Should I put the card back in and see if I can enable this VBR? Again, this is the first I've heard of VBR and VMR9. I don't have a clue how to enable or disable either.

[gplasky]

Maybe if you open the mpeg file with gSpot or some other utility you might be able to determine some of the specs.

Gerry

[stanger89]

VBR is Variable Bit Rate, it means more bits are used for things that are hard to encode and fewer are used for easy things, it averages out to be the rate you set. The other option is CBR, where the bitrate is constant.

VMR9 is the DirectX 9 Video Mixing Renderer, it serves the same purpose as overlay but works different.

The two have nothing to do with each other, VMR9 has nothing to do with encoding and VBR has nothing to do with recording. VBR probably wouldn't make enough difference to justify testing again, if it made a difference it would only edge the PQ up a little on tough material.

[AJ Bertelson]

What happens when you play back the files in Zoomplayer or windows media player do you see the same artifacts?

[jblade44]

I can tell you that with the E-Home and MCE/NVDVD using VMR9 makes a huge difference. Sports were terible to watch but now I have no problems watching sports. Not sure if Sage wil utilize it the same as MCE. I am waiting for the full support of the E-Home to try Sage again.

[mlbdude]

Originally posted by jblade44
I can tell you that with the E-Home and MCE/NVDVD using VMR9 makes a huge difference. Sports were terible to watch but now I have no problems watching sports. Not sure if Sage wil utilize it the same as MCE. I am waiting for the full support of the E-Home to try Sage again.

Any issues with sports or fast moving scenes are more than likely related to deinterlacing configurations and really has nothing to do with VMR9. I would assume that MCE configured that for you properly.