PVR-350 TV OUT is worse than normal graphics card output!

[loiphin]

Hi there,

I recently purchased SageTV specifically so that I could try the v2 beta with the PVR-350 hardware decoder output.

I have tried it, and I think it sucks! My two problems are:

Misallignment of the screen when using the OSD on a PAL TV. When using just the TV out with no OSD, it works fine.

The biggest issue I have is that I think the picture quality is the same or slightly worse that the output of my Geforce MX440 graphics card! It is very disappointing as I have forked out the cash purely to be able to use the hardware decoder on the PVR-350, and its really crap.


Any help, or suggestions much appreciated.

[kny3twalker]

dang man sorry to hear that

I thought a hardware decoder would be better

usually hardware is better than software in these situations

I am sure you could probably trade it to someone here or sell it if you want to get a pvr 250 instead ........

What about the quality do you like better about the MX 440?

And what does the pvr 350 do that is so bad?

I know TiVo and Replay went hardware decoder, as with cable boxes(digital), etc.....

and this seems so funny because most people really like the 350 better

you could buy an X card with a pvr 250 MCE for about the same price but sage does not currently support OSD on it
which is ashame............

I wonder if they have a contract with hauppauge about this??? or what there reasons are

I would submit a bug about your problems because Sage thinks they are going to release the retail v2 soon

I think it is funny that they promised support for OSD with 350s and they know so many people have problems (just from reading the forum, not a personal opinion)

maybe SageTV linux will be nice (if there is such a thing)

[loiphin]

Hi there,

Yeah, judging by what I have read everywhere, surely the TV out should be really good. I am using the Composite out connected to my PAL TV.

The Geforce MX440 seems to be fairly good, just a little blurry. I have a digital cable box, so the picture quality is generally very good. So when I switched to TV out using SageTV 2 RC3, I expected to get a better picture. But it seems to be actually slightly worse. The picture appears to be doubled up almost, but very slightly. I would also say its just as blurry as the normal MX440 output.

[kny3twalker]

try using VMR 9 for output
I do not know if you can do that with the hardware decoder since I do not have one
but it should way improve the blurriness with a normal video card

I am using VMR9 with NVDVD 3.0 output to my TV from the notebook FX Go 5200
and Picture quality is quite good

overlay gave me double image so I will not use it with output to a TV

probably even VMR7 would be better when outputting

try that (if possible to set rendering with hardware) and see how it does

at least try it with your MX 440

also need a good remote

http://www.x10.com/techliving1/index_lola.htm


Lola X10 remotes on the cheap again

free with 5.90 in shipping

[loiphin]

FIGURED IT OUT!!!

The ghosting on the TV OUT was due to crap quality cabling!!! Now its looking really good on TV OUT.

Thanks for everyone's help.

[kny3twalker]

so which is better now, loiphin?

[Narflex]

Please don't crosspost in the future loiphin, its bad forum etiquette. (I've removed the other posts)

Thanks.

[loiphin]

TV out is way way better!

I have also been using Beyond TV 3.4, and it seems BTV thrashes the drive alot, whereas SageTV is nice and quiet ?? Cant understand why...

My last problem is that I am importing XMLTV info from a Digiguide scraper, that I use for BTV. The issue is that the times are all out by an hour. I dont know how to compensate for this? Do I need to re-write the whole XML file, or is there something in SageTV 2.0 that would fix this ?

loiphin

[Narflex]

There's a setting in the properties file called:
time_zone=

Set it to whatever time zone you want to use instead of your system default(various formats are accepted, like "CST" or "GMT-4" for exaple) . This'll fix any "off by an hour" errors that can occur. We tracked one of these down and it looked like a bug in the core of Java so we stopped and adding this setting instead.