Is washed out picture and audio normal? - advice needed

[poser]

Is it normal to have a washed out picture and quiet (low quality almost muffled) audio when using SageTV? If not, please give me advice on how to make my picture as crisp and vivid as viewing OTA or Cable broadcasts using my regular TV tuner.

I am running a quad Hauppage 250's and an ATi 9600(?) with s-video out. Not sure what my sound card is. No matter what the settings are, the output from my PC just looks worse than regular TV. Detail is lower, colors aren't as deep, audio is poor. My recording quality is "Best" or "Very good". My TV is a Toshiba 55" old-school rear projection. When I switch my TV source from video1 (sagetv) to Ant1 the difference is amazing. This is causing me to watch live tv on regular tv and Sage only for recorded shows.

Are there any software settings that I can/should change? Would a different video card help? I have a DVI output on my video card, would that look better if I had a different TV that supported it? I want to make changes but don't want to waste time or money doing the wrong thing. Any advice is appreciated.

[poser]

Anyone have input on this question?

[nielm]

washed out picture usually means mis-calibration of the TV-out of the video card, or the TV itself for that input source...

Also, VMR9 looks more washed out than overlay (search the forums for VMR9 color calibration)

For quiet sound, check the levels of the Wave and System Volume in the volume control for your sound card... Also check Bass and Treble levels if they are adjustable (may need to go into Options/Properties to enable the controls). Some decoders are also 'quieter' than others..

[Sten3danny]

I was wondering why Sage doesn't have color controls for playback.
I am using the Nvidia decoder and can't get to the decoder properties when Sage is running. If I adjust the decoder properties from within ZP, for example, the changes don't affect Sage's playback.

The only way I know of to 'fix' the VMR9 lack of contrast is to either adjust brightness/contrast in the driver settings or on the display device.

Both methods result in the brightness/contrast of all other stuff, like watching photos for example, being wrong.

How does everybody else handle this?

[gplasky]

Have you tried using the controls within Sage to calibrate brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, etc. It's available in the Setup Wizard configuration.
See this link for advanced help:
http://users.mcleodusa.net/r/ratpac/..._contrast.html

Gerry

[nielm]

Originally Posted by Sten3danny

The only way I know of to 'fix' the VMR9 lack of contrast is to either adjust brightness/contrast in the driver settings or on the display device.

Both methods result in the brightness/contrast of all other stuff, like watching photos for example, being wrong.

How does everybody else handle this?

One other option is to use FFDSHOW as a post-processor and adjust the output levels from 16-235 to 0-255, (which is effectively what Overlay does in hardware) but this will reduce image quality as there is no way to convert 220 discrete levels of gray smoothly into 255

Here is another thread discussing the issue:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...1&postcount=17

[Sten3danny]

I think I have my recordings calibrated corrected, the problem is in the playback. I also have different clients running different decoders etc...

Nevertheless, that link you provided is very usefull, gplasky. I'll look into that to tweak things.

Ffdshow is not really an option for me, as it drops the decoder into software mode which results in much inferior deinterlacing. It does for me at least.

[dale_ander]

I just upgraded (?) from version 5 to version 6. In the hopes it would work better than 5 has. Ever since I upgraded from 2.2 to 5.0.04 my system went from being rock solid to very flaky. (The only reason I upgraded was because I wanted to start recording everything in HD to go with my new HD TV.) Anyway, after upgrading to 6 I immediately noticed the fact that my HD recordings and live HD TV looked must worse than they had. They weren't as sharp and they were very washed out looking. I tried cranking up the contrast on my TV to no avail. Seeing mention above that VMR9 looks more washed out than Overlay mode made me go check it out. For one thing, I had SageTV in Overlay mode before the upgrade but it turns out that after the upgrade it was in VMR9 mode. I changed it back Overlay and hallelujah, my recordings looked good again.