Picture Quality?????

[springgrove1]

If the quality from your incoming signal (cable, direct tv etc.) was 10, what rating would would you give to Sage TV at playback?

I give it a 7. Even at the higest quality recording setting.

I have had it up and running for almost 2 years. Before I start goofing around with it I wanted to know if this was normal?

Thanks.

[CyRex]

I'd rate mine around a 9 right now... Thats with:

- Analog cable via PVR-150
- Highest recording quality
- Nvidia decoder
- Radeon ??? (I forget the model) via S-Video

I spent weeks playing around with different decoders, FFDShow filters, etc because the quality was just never good enough. I finally found the right combination for my setup, though - I haven't even thought about picture quality in over a year...

You didn't mention - whats your setup like? (Capture device / decoders / video card / TV)

-Dan

[paulbeers]

It all depends. If I ignore my crappy channels (mostly the low band channels)....

Clients:
MVP's - 8.5 (my mvp's are a little dark, and little heavy on the red hue)
Full Client - 9 (geforce 6600 using component output and cyberlink codecs)

My old client used S-video from a geforce2 using Sage codecs was crap. I put it at about a 5 maybe? Then I moved a geforce 4 into it and it was probably a 6 and then switched to cyberlink codecs and it went upto a 7. Still an inferior output type comparent to the component output of my geforce 6600 and inferior card is why it still wasn't upto the 9 that I think my Full Client is now.

Edit: I should also mention that I am only using analog cable.

[springgrove1]

I have,

Direct TV
PVR 150 (Software and card from Sage)
250 G Hard Drive
Compaqu Pressario 6000 2.4G Pentium 4
512M memory
The default S video out with what ever video card comes in PC.
Set at Max recording size to hard drive.

Should I be looking at getting a better video card??

Thanks.

[blade]

This is all subjective so what people rate it means very little. PQ can look very good or it can look horrible depending on your setup.

Personally for the capture quality anything below 3GB/hr and I can see some artifacts. Anything greater and I don't really notice any improvement. The ideal capture size will depend on your source, what size display you're using, etc... Basically it's up to the user to decide what is satisfactory.

I haven't used S-video much, but what little I have has looked like garbage. If you're using a SDTV you'd get much better quality from something like the MVP than a video card. If you have a HDTV then a good Nvidia card with DVI or component out would be a huge step up from S-video.

[talonmike]

Originally Posted by CyRex

I'd rate mine around a 9 right now... Thats with:

- Analog cable via PVR-150
- Highest recording quality
- Nvidia decoder
- Radeon ??? (I forget the model) via S-Video

I spent weeks playing around with different decoders, FFDShow filters, etc because the quality was just never good enough. I finally found the right combination for my setup, though - I haven't even thought about picture quality in over a year...

You didn't mention - whats your setup like? (Capture device / decoders / video card / TV)

-Dan

Did you see a big improvment with nvidia codec? Is it better than intervideo?

[domc]

I rate it about a 6. I've been fooling around with it for a year. Three different Video cards and now I have HDTV (42") with DVI out and still get an inferior picture because watching SDTV on HDTV is sucks anyway. We have decided to only watch SageTV on a 19inch (sdtv) TV since the smaller picture looks great and DVD's upconverted on the HDTV. I would upgrade my cards to HDTV but you can only get over the air shows and no Dishnetwork HDTV shows (discovery, etc) with the cards. We don't watch to much over the air shows (local networks) to justify the HDTV card cost.

I have tried everything from different cards, drivers, purevideo, ffdshow, re-installs, and so on. I'm sticking with sagetv for one reason. NO COMMERCIALS and it autoskips them too. We like the features over the other packages. Dishnetwork PVR's do not autoskip commercials.

So I'm hoping within the next 2-3 years sagetv will fully support HDTV input through Dish/Cable/DirecTV. Of course someone third party will have to crack the encryption on the HDTV signal from those services to work with sagetv. <Grin>

[blade]

Originally Posted by domc

...still get an inferior picture because watching SDTV on HDTV is sucks anyway.

I've heard this from a lot of people, but I always disagree. I have nothing but SD and it looks better on my HDTV than it ever did on my old SD set.

When I first got a HD set I was very disappointed with how SD looked on it. After running new coax, adding a signal amp, and calibrating the display it looks far better with SD than any SD set I've ever owned. Noise and other signal problems are a lot more noticeable on a HD set, which is one reason so many people say SD looks worse on a HD set. Another reason is most people purchase a larger HD set than what their old SD one was and of course the larger the set the more obvious the imperfections are going to be. I went from a 52" SD to a 57" HD so the size change wasn't that dramatic. My grandfather has a 60" SDTV and it is nowhere near the same PQ as my set.

[springgrove1]

Hey thanks everybody.

I think I will just stick with what I have now.

[rfutscher]

Originally Posted by blade

I've heard this from a lot of people, but I always disagree. I have nothing but SD and it looks better on my HDTV than it ever did on my old SD set.

......

Analog SD is really bad for me. It doesn't matter if I am watching on a regular TV, a tuner card in my PC, or on a LCD. I live where a hill blocks my antenna from the transmitting tower and on either side of of the hill are tall buildings creating bad multipath. The ghosts and noise makes it unpleasant to watch.

Digital SD received with my HD Wonder is bad also. Lots of audio jumps, video tileing, stuttering. The HD Wonder doesn't deal with multipath very well.

On the other hand digital SD received with my Fusion USB is fantastic. Most stations in town have digital facilities and most video has never been converted to NTSC. I will never be satisfied with anything that was converted to NTSC after seeing an SD signal that has been component the whole way from the camera to my display.

When you talk about SD you need to say if it is analog or digital.

[blade]

Originally Posted by rfutscher

Analog SD is really bad for me. It doesn't matter if I am watching on a regular TV, a tuner card in my PC, or on a LCD. I live where a hill blocks my antenna from the transmitting tower and on either side of of the hill are tall buildings creating bad multipath. The ghosts and noise makes it unpleasant to watch.

Digital SD received with my HD Wonder is bad also. Lots of audio jumps, video tileing, stuttering. The HD Wonder doesn't deal with multipath very well.

On the other hand digital SD received with my Fusion USB is fantastic. Most stations in town have digital facilities and most video has never been converted to NTSC. I will never be satisfied with anything that was converted to NTSC after seeing an SD signal that has been component the whole way from the camera to my display.

When you talk about SD you need to say if it is analog or digital.

I'm no expert, but how does any of that change whether or not the same SD signal is going to look better on a HD or SD set? Either way you have captured the signal and are outputting it to either a SD or HD display. Like I said I'm no expert so it may make a difference, but I would appreciate it if you could explain why.

[mickp]

I give it 10 out of 10.

I'm using a cheapish Panasonic LM2 800x600 projector for display. It's not hd (obviously) but the lamps are affordable enough to use it as a full time tv replacement. The LM2 is fed via the regular old analog monitor out from my video card.

Picture quality is excellent imho with a good source. I was very dissapointed when I saw the output of my pvr 150's using the built in analog tuners. Blowing the picture up to ~3m realy allows you to appreciate all of the wavy, ghosty, fuzzy analog goodness. That said, the quality from the 150's was no different from what I saw when plugging in a vcr to tune tv.

When DVB became available in my area I bought one then another standard def DVB set top boxes and fed them into my pvr 150's one with composite in and the other with svid input (it's a different model). There's a noticable difference between the two and I put this down to the composite video being a bit rubbish.

I recently purchased (after moving to SAGE from another application) a Haupauge Nova T 500 dual tuner DVB card. As I only have an 800x600 projector I only bother with recording SD channels. It's quality is indistinguishable from a DVD playing in my hardware DVD player. The output from the pvr 150's are comparable(ish). The compisite is a bit fuzzier as I mentioned earlier. The main noticable difference with the pvr fed devices is that I haven't gotten around to calibrating the capture on them yet so they are a bit darker.

I capture everything at DVD Standard Play Format: DVD @ 3.2 GB/hr and can really start to pick up on artifacts if I take it much lower.

Mick.

[rfutscher]

Originally Posted by blade

I'm no expert, but how does any of that change whether or not the same SD signal is going to look better on a HD or SD set? Either way you have captured the signal and are outputting it to either a SD or HD display. Like I said I'm no expert so it may make a difference, but I would appreciate it if you could explain why.

With analog the last mile is what degrades the signal the most. High powered transmitters for over the air, multiple amps for cable, analog interference/noise/snow, impulse noise, analog compression (NTSC), multipath, inter mod distortion, are just a few of the sources for degradation.

The two things I find really annoying with analog is the dot crawl you get with NTSC and the multipath ghosting.

For digital either you get the signal or you don't. What is transmitted is exactly what you get, as long as the signal is above the limit for error correction. No degradation in the last mile.

Digital compression is one of the few sources of degradation for digital. Most stations have a wide bandwidth stream for HD. When they broadcast SD they usually use this high bandwidth stream for SD. Some stations up convert the SD signal to HD. In this case they use expensive, high quality up converters that do a much better job than anything I can do at home. In both cases the quality is much better than analog reception I get.

Digital satellite distribution is a different story. There is very much a bandwidth limit and some providers over compress the digital signals.

[blade]

Originally Posted by rfutscher

With analog the last mile is what degrades the signal the most. High powered transmitters for over the air, multiple amps for cable, analog interference/noise/snow, impulse noise, analog compression (NTSC), multipath, inter mod distortion, are just a few of the sources for degradation.

The two things I find really annoying with analog is the dot crawl you get with NTSC and the multipath ghosting.

For digital either you get the signal or you don't. What is transmitted is exactly what you get, as long as the signal is above the limit for error correction. No degradation in the last mile.

Digital compression is one of the few sources of degradation for digital. Most stations have a wide bandwidth stream for HD. When they broadcast SD they usually use this high bandwidth stream for SD. Some stations up convert the SD signal to HD. In this case they use expensive, high quality up converters that do a much better job than anything I can do at home. In both cases the quality is much better than analog reception I get.

Digital satellite distribution is a different story. There is very much a bandwidth limit and some providers over compress the digital signals.

That still doesn't answer my question. I'm not debating the difference in quality among different SD signals. It was said that the same SD signal going into a SD set would produce a better image than if it went into a HD set, which I disagreed with. I've already said that SD sets tend to hide a noisey signal better than HD sets.

With the exception of really noisey signals can you explain to me why the same relatively clean signal would look better on the SD set than the HD set or why how you recieved the signal would make a difference in which set yielded the better picture?

[Mark SS]

Originally Posted by blade

With the exception of really noisey signals can you explain to me why the same relatively clean signal would look better on the SD set than the HD set or why how you recieved the signal would make a difference in which set yielded the better picture?

SD vs HD - because it isn't scaled. The top of the range SD plasma's are widely regarded as superior to most HD panels for displaying SD content.

Signal type - a) because differnet bitrates may be used b) because the quality of the encoding may differ. Prime examples in the UK are the Freeview channels on DVB-T compared with DVB-S on Sky, where bitrates are highly variable. One of the best channels for PQ is Five on DVB-T which despite its middle of the road bitrate has vastly better quality than many comparable channels due to the quality of the encoding.

[blade]

Originally Posted by Mark SS

SD vs HD - because it isn't scaled. The top of the range SD plasma's are widely regarded as superior to most HD panels for displaying SD content.

Thank you, I had forgotten about the HDTV's having to scale.

I've only had middle of the road SD sets to compare to and with them I have never seen better results especially when using my HTPC for scaling the SD signal. I sure wouldn't say it sucks in comparision, but maybe that's just me.

[rfutscher]

Originally Posted by blade

That still doesn't answer my question. I'm not debating the difference in quality among different SD signals. It was said that the same SD signal going into a SD set would produce a better image than if it went into a HD set, which I disagreed with. I've already said that SD sets tend to hide a noisy signal better than HD sets.

With the exception of really noisy signals can you explain to me why the same relatively clean signal would look better on the SD set than the HD set or why how you received the signal would make a difference in which set yielded the better picture?

Take the same SD camera at the TV station and send the signal to you three different ways.

1) Up convert to HD, transmit it using a digital transport stream, decode it and feed it to both an HD set and a down converter for the TV. You will also have to convert to NTSC (or PAL) and to feed it to your TV. It looks better on the HD set.

2) Convert the SD component signal to NTSC. Broadcast it from an analog transmitter. Receive it and send it to both the HD up converter for the HD display and the TV set. You are up converting a noisy signal that has been compressed with a analog compression system. It looks better on the TV.

3) Transmit the SD component signal using a digital transport stream. Receive it and send it to both the HD set and the TV. The TV needs an NTSC signal and has to be compressed using analog compression to NTSC. The up converter in the HD set gets a full bandwidth component signal. Most likely the HD display will look better but may not, depending on the display.

The difference is where the up converter for the HD display is located and its signal source. A up converted signal that has been converted into NTSC will not look as good as a signal that has remained in component format. Remember you started with the same SD component camera signal. Some say that it looks better on the TV, some say it looks better on the HD display. Both are correct.

[jayrbrown77]

I just bought a 40" Sony KDL-40V2500, and I have to say the SD does not look that great at all. The same goes for the Cox DVR that I have. I have both of them feeding to the same TV. Sage TV is currently going into the TV via S video (ordered a VGA cable for PC input).

From across the room, the SD video doesn't look that bad, but doesn't look that great either depending on the show (Cox DVR and Sage DVR).

So what are your suggestions? I take it from Blades comments, the Coaxial should be replaced, and a signal amp should be installed. The coaxial is split into three feeds (1 cox dvr, 2 sage dvr ). Maybe I should have Cox do this. They may need to replace from the pole.

[jominor]

Originally Posted by springgrove1

If the quality from your incoming signal (cable, direct tv etc.) was 10, what rating would would you give to Sage TV at playback?

I give it a 7. Even at the higest quality recording setting.

I have had it up and running for almost 2 years. Before I start goofing around with it I wanted to know if this was normal?

Thanks.

I'll go 10 because it Sage looks better than my TV. I use SD, Nvideo Purevideo, analog cable with a signal amp and the signal split among 3 tuners at 3gig/hr.

A little experimentation with decoders, cards, etc can yield big benefits. Before my Nvidia, I had an ATI 8500 with their inhouse decoder than looked great also.

[blade]

Originally Posted by rfutscher

Take the same SD camera at the TV station and send the signal to you three different ways.

1) Up convert to HD, transmit it using a digital transport stream, decode it and feed it to both an HD set and a down converter for the TV. You will also have to convert to NTSC (or PAL) and to feed it to your TV. It looks better on the HD set.

2) Convert the SD component signal to NTSC. Broadcast it from an analog transmitter. Receive it and send it to both the HD up converter for the HD display and the TV set. You are up converting a noisy signal that has been compressed with a analog compression system. It looks better on the TV.

3) Transmit the SD component signal using a digital transport stream. Receive it and send it to both the HD set and the TV. The TV needs an NTSC signal and has to be compressed using analog compression to NTSC. The up converter in the HD set gets a full bandwidth component signal. Most likely the HD display will look better but may not, depending on the display.

The difference is where the up converter for the HD display is located and its signal source. A up converted signal that has been converted into NTSC will not look as good as a signal that has remained in component format. Remember you started with the same SD component camera signal. Some say that it looks better on the TV, some say it looks better on the HD display. Both are correct.

Thanks for the explanation, though it's still a little over my head as far as all the technical details. I receive my SD through option #2 and my HD sets still look better than my SD ones did. At least to me if you have good scaling and a reasonably clean signal having SD on a HD set isn't as terrible as some others make it out to be. In my case they actually look better than the SD sets I've owned.