Improvement/tweaking suggestions?

[emcnish]

I have put together a test system to prove out a home built PVR over the store bough DVD burner/Tivo solutions to myself and my wife. Thanks to everyone's advice I have purchased a Hauppauge 250 and a Leadtek WinFast A340 (GeForce FX 5200). Both are installed in a 2.2 GHz Dell with 512 MB of memory. I have installed just the drivers for the 5200, the entire install for the 250 and the latest version of STV. From FreeBSD4me's experience I learned quality cables are important. So, the 5200's S-Video TV out is connected to the Video-1 input on my 27" Sony (just a "normal" TV) by a Monster S-Video/S-Video cable. The cable from the wall is split, one leg going to the TV, the other to the Hauppauge card. I only have "normal" cable, not digital.

Here's my problems/questions:

1. The remote response is a little slow. I push a button and there is a notable delay before something changes on the screen. It is especially noticeable in the "search by title" screen where you spell out programs. I get used to it after a while but is there some way to speed it up?
2. Changing channels is slow. At least there is a delay between pictures. I assume this is so the recording buffer can fill. I'm guessing there isn't a way around this, right?
3. The picture quality, even at the highest recording quality, is still not as crisp as straight TV. With my set-up I can flip between live TV and the HTPC. For instance, If I'm on a news channel, the ticker at the bottom is not as clear. I'm not sure if the Hauppauge card, the GeForce card or the recording level is the issue. I have gone through the Adjusting Capture Brightness and Contrast on the SageTV Community Development Website. Unfortunately the "crispness" never came through. However, I wasn't exactly sure what dScaler and ffdshow and the suggested settings were supposed to do. Plus, the picture and histogram would freeze after about 30 seconds and I'd have to change channels to recover. Is there a better way to improve the picture? Is there a way to turn off the recording and watch the raw feed? How can I adjust each component (TV, 5200, 250) separately?

By the way, if I should have posted all these questions separately I apologize.

Thanks!

[kny3twalker]

I can say that the video decoder can make a large different
but the picture cannot be better than the source
digital satellite looks much better when recorded rather than my analogue cable
also the render technique makes a big difference
VMR9 tends to look good but only with nvDVD
otherwise try overlay

and in my personal opinion intervideo non css and all intervideo decoders suck