Video Quality Question

[mikejaner]

First of all, I would like to say, I recently purchased SageTV, and am very pleased with the quality of the software. I recently dropped another software package ($nap$tream) for this one because of the quality of the underlying technology and read about the improvements coming in 2.0. I cannot wait to see those (wink, wink). Anyways, I have a question

I have a P4 1.8Ghz box with 512Mb 160 Gig Hard Drive PVR 250 Personal Cinema GF2MX 64mb card from VisionTek and a Soundblaster live value.

I have been tweaking the past couple of nights and I have noticed a couple of things.

The NVDVD codec seems to work best for me. I love the color tweaking capabilities, and the cpu usage seems lowest for me(35-40%)

Now to the question:

I also have a Tivo series 1 and last night I hooked my SageTV box up to the same 27" Sony as my Tivo. Tivo was hooked up to Coax input, and SageTv was hooked up to Svideo input.

After adjusting the color properties on NvDVD, I got the to pictures to be the same colors, balance, contrast, brightness etc....
What I did notice is that the picture on the SageTVbox was a little fuzzier than the Tivo, which surprized me cause, the Tivo was coming in through Coax.
The personal cinema card has a beautiful picture in windows with hardly any flicker, as compared to most video cards, so I would like to say it's not the card. I could be wrong though.

Has anybody ever compared side by side with the Tivo and SageTv, and actually got the picture to be as sharp as the picture on tivo? I would like to know what hardware/decoder you did it with.
I have a Geforce4 ti4600 which I know has overscan fix etc.. I will try it tonight, but I would imagine it couldn't be much better than the separate box for the personal cinema card I have now.

Any input would be appreciated,

mike

[mlbdude]

The softness in the image is probalby coming from the deinterlacing that is done to the video. What are you using? Weave or Bob? Weave is probably the best.

Deinterlacing causes all kinds of smearing and ghosting as well as softening the image. If you have some decoder besides the Elecard that supports Adaptive deinterlacing as well that may be worth a try.

You should also try disabeling deinterlacing in your decoder and see if your TV can handle the output of your card properly.

I am currently using the Elecard decoders with deinterlacing turned off. I still see a scanline once and awhile but overall the picture is just as sharp as regular TV (which is kind of bad since I can see the macroblocking easier).

[mlbdude]

If you want to test this without installing codecs or messing with Sage, I think you can playback the Sage recording through MS Media Player and get interlaced video.

Make sure you are running a 480 resolution too 640 x 480 or 720 x 480. Overscan may be needed too (I am) but not sure.

[mikejaner]

Thanks for the info,
It's been a while, so maybe you have a quick answer for me.
Where can I tweak my resolution down to 720X480 from 800X600, which is the lowest XP will allow by default.

mike

[valnar]

The TV-out quality (composite or s-video) of any PC graphics card is never good as a dedicated DVD player or TIVO.

Now, VGA/RGB to a progressive display, like a monitor, is a different question.

The GeForce series have crappy TV-Out. ATI's newest Radeon's are okay, but the best is an older discontinued Matrox G400 Dualhead 32MB AGP with the TV-out cable. Phenomenal!

-robert

[mlbdude]

You can change your resolution to lower than 800 x 600 in the Advanced\Adapter\List All Modes. I have a Radeon and have tweaked it to use overscan and the 720x480 resolution.

[Mike Young]

I had heard overscan was desirable for best picture quality. I am using the 720X480 on my Radeon, but I havent found the overscan option,
can you elaborate ?

[mlbdude]

You need to enable the option in the registry or (as I did) use Rage3d Treak.

http://www.rage3d.com/r3dtweak/

Once it is enabled there will be a button to turn it on in the ATI control pannels.

It will help youf video look better and the video will take up the entire screen completely. It will make navigating in windows a little harder. Also, you will have to modify your sage.properties file to get the OSD centered correctly. If you like the overscan I can get you my sage.properties numbers to help.

[Mike Young]

It kind of funny, everyone seems to have different issues regarding the video quality....maybe its just personal prefrence. I have been able to obtain what I consider to be excellent screen resolution with no atifacts, tickers scroll smoothly etc, using either the Elcard or the PowerDVD codecs. I can hardly tell the difference with live TV, the only thing I have not been able to fix much is what I would call "Color Depth" Im not sure if that is the right word, but it is very noticable that the colors are weaker on the SageTV than coming straight from the dish. The color settings in Setup, do nothing to help this, nor do any of the PowerStrip settings I have tried. The only way I can describe the effect is that the colors look "shinny' on straight TV and kind of dull on Sage.
If anyone has noticed this (or not) or has any suggestions on how to adjust this I would be gratefull ! For me this is the missing piece to a near perfect picture quality.

mike/

[mlbdude]

Yeah, everybody sees something different I think.

Here is a good guide to Radeon tweaks especially for TV out...

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/radeon-tv-out/?66285

Have you messed around with the registy tweaks for color/contrast/brightness? That is the only place I can think of to change the color settings. Also, compare the color problem to shows encoded at different bitrates.