New Sage User : Recording Quality Problems

[seejayw]

I've spent a few hours trying to get the recording quality to be half decent on my new Sage 2.1 install and am getting frustrated. I purchased the bundle with the Haup PVR-350 card.
With my install my plan is only to record programming then send the MPEGs over to my Prismiq player for viewing. I am not really concerned with using the TV out feature or viewing on my PC right now-----all I need is a good quality MPEG to use.
At first the quality was so poor it was unwatchable (freezing, blocky pixels,) After reading some of the forums I tried an amplifier on my cable run from the cable box to the PC (its probably about 100 ft but am using RG6 cable) This improved the quality to watchable but still poor.
I have tried using various Recording Qualities, Have the HW Decoder feature Enabled, tried VMR9/Overlay and several other settings but can't seem to get any noticeable improvement.
My Video card is an on-board type so isnt the greatest but it actually plays the live TV feed quite well----certainly a lot better than the recorded quality.
I'd sure appreciate some input!! Based on some of the rave reviews I've read here I must be missing something obvious! Anyone out there using the Prismiq with Sage? (I dont think its the problem.....but you never know)

PC is AMD Duron 1.2G , 512MB, On board AGP8 w/3D accelerator, PVR-350

[Toddly]

Let me see if I have your current setup straight. At the moment you are viewing the recordings on the PC or are you using the 350 TV out or are you using the Prismiq? I am thinking it is the Prismiq player by what you say. Are you viewing LiveTV on the PC when they look good?

I use DVD Standard play for most of my recordings and they are very good.

[seejayw]

I am recording TV then moving the recorded MPEG's over to a different directory to play these on the Prismiq player later on. I don't use TV out on the PVR-350 at all. I bought that card because of the HW decoding feature.

My problem is that the recording quality is poor (grainy, ghosting) no matter which quality setting I use. It is watchable at DVD Standard but seems to become worse if I move to DVD Long or lower.
However, when I DO watch live TV on the PC screen the quality seems good (given that I don't have a very high end graphics card)

The Prismiq player plays whatever you give to it (MPEG2/4,DivX) and in my experience does not enhance or degrade these files. So, my thought is that it may be with the 350 card or with the Sage SW settings. ??
I've installed the latest Hauppauge drivers/ Java 1.4x/Win DirectX9, I just dont understand whats going wrong.

[pcuoco]

Ok, just a couple of things to clarify.

1) If you are using the prismiq to view the mpegs, No playback settings in SageTV will help you at all, because it's strictly a recorder at that point, so any image quality problems are either from the source or ocurring in the prismiq player itself. However, if live tv looks good on your PC monitor in Sage then the problems 99% likeley to be the prismiq.

2) Hardware decoding options in Sage are only applicable if you use the 350's video out to a TV. To get an image on the PC monitor it's all software decoding. So let's take that out of the equation and disable it since you plan to use the prismiq anyway.

3) When you say Live TV is fine but not recorded TV, are you using Sage to view live TV and the recordings on your monitor or on the prismiq? Because in Sage even "live" tv is played back from a buffered recording, so the quality should be exactly the same. Again, if live TV or otherwise looks good on the computer but not on the prismiq, the prismiq is the likely culprit.

4) If you're using the prismiq how does it handle the Mpeg decoding? Does it have it's own built in hardware decoder or does it need your host PC to decode the video? If it's the host PC, what software decoder does it use and is it different from the selected decoder in Sage?

5) How is the prismiq connected to the host PC? Wired ethernet or wireless? If it's wireless "b" you're going to have a problem with bandwith and it would almost definitely create the freezing you've described. You'd do much better with wireless "g" or better yet wired.

Whew that's a lot of questions, but you've got a lot of variables in the equation. Hope some of this helps.

[Toddly]

I would look at a recording via the PC monitor to see how it looks. If it looks good like the LiveTV then I would think the Prismiq player is causing the problem.

[seejayw]

Thanks for the feedback. To try to answer Toddly and Pcuoco:
1) The Prismiq unit has a fairly powerful 32 bit MIPS processor with an integrated HW decoder. I have fed it MPEG2/4 and DivX video files and it has played them back well with the same quality as the original recording...as far as I can see. I definitely DONT use a wireless connection---it is a wired Cat5 connection between PC and Player.
2) I have tried different record quality settings in Sage and also played back the recorded files through my PC....it definately appeared to be better than when played back on the Prismiq so I guess theres something bad happening there! Not sure what though. I guess I am just hoping to find someone who has used a Prismiq with Sage to find out what their experience has been.