Bad recording quality with Hauppauge 250

[dfunk]

My picture quality using a Hauppauge PVR-250 is very washed out, almost unwatchable for some programming with bright pictures. I'm pretty sure the problem is with the encoding, not decoding, since playback of SageTV recorded shows on other systems exhibit the same washed out picture.

The problem isn't limited to SageTV. Hauppauge's Wintv2000 application exhibits identical picture problems. I've tried adjusting the brightness and contrast (also the hue, sat, and sharpness), but can't find a setting that approaches the quality of my NTSC cable feed. I'm somewhat familiar with the basics of these adjustments, having used Avia several times to calibrate HDTVs, so I'm perplexed by my utter failure in this case.

Here's my setup.
Shuttle SB51G, 2.0G Celeron, 512M mem, Win2000
Radeon Vivo - Catalyst 4.7 drivers
HP PVR 250 - driver Ver 1.18.21.22266
Samsung HDTV using svideo
SageTV V2.1

Settings---------Default------Currently Using
Brightness----------136-----------70
Contrast------------128-----------82
Saturation----------130----------130
Hue-----------------129----------129
Sharpness----------170----------170

Here's what I've tried so far. Note that I'm focusing on brightness and contrast first (if that's a mistake, let me know).

Calibrated svideo output to TV using PC's DVD player and Avia.
Results, got satisfactory picture but didn't help Hauppauge recorded material.

Eyeball Calibration of Hauppauge settings
1. Tune a "bright" program on SageTV and get into the color calibration menu.
2. Start from the defaults and lower brightness until the overly bright picture is a bit better
3. then lower contrast until image becomes too soft, raise it up a bit.
4. Repeat 2 and 3 trying to optimized detail.
Result: current settings listed above, picture is better than default, but still way worse than cable feed (as seen viewed directly on the TV).

Attempted to use ffdshow for calibration, per SageTV documentation
Result: SageTV crashed when entering calibration menu. Still looking into why.

Tried 4-5 settings others have posted for PVR-250.
Result: Not better than my current settings, usually much worse.

Any ideas?
thanks, dfunk

[dfunk]

bump

[mls]

Won't help you much, but all I did was change the Brightness from 136 down to 114 (leaving the others at their defaults) and it comes out almost an identical match to what I get directly from the TV tuner itself (on my cheap 20" SDTV).

[zz5]

If you're using overlay for the video, you need to make sure that your adjusting the contrast and brightness for the overlay instead of the desktop. If you just adjusting the desktop settings, it won't have an effect on the overlay. The contrast and brightness are the right ones to adjust. You should see very noticeable results doing this.

If this isn't the problem, I suggest making a DVD of a recording. Then you can see how it looks without worrying output problems on a PC. I have 3 PVR-250's and 1 PVR-350 and all of them have great, perfect color and picture quality with every driver I've used and I've never made any adjustments. The color matches pretty much perfectly with the original TV signal.