PVR150 Smoothing

[scbundy]

Where can I disable the PVR150's internal smoothing? I'm not talking about the reg tweak tool. I've heard you can do it in graphedit or something like that.

[scbundy]

No reply to this? What is everyone else's situation? Am I the only one who is watching live tv through Sage in worse quality that on normal tv? Or does everyone get worse quality and just settles for it? I'm new to this. I don't know the rules. I assumed that live tv through Sage would look the same as live tv through normal standard tv. It doesnt.

[JUC]

It should be very close. What video card are you using and how are you connecting it to your TV?
JUC

[scbundy]

Geforce 4200 and S-Video, but that's not the problem. When I watch DVD's or high quality mpg's the image looks fantastic. It's only live TV that I'm getting what appears to be noise reduction applied to an image that doesn't need any. I've been fighting this for a while, I've tried everything. I've tried the Hauppauge tweak tool, graphedit, Nvidia Video Post Processor, ffdshow, I've tried them all and nothing works. In Sage I went into the tuner card settings and increased the sharpness from the default of 63 to 255 and it never changed how the image looked at all, which I find really weird. I've got the color looking good, contrast and brightness are fine. It's just a sharpness thing now. My PVR150 is making live TV look smoothed over. All the sharpness settings I find, like the one in Sage, the tweak tool or graphedit have absolutely no effect on the tv image. I'm beginning to go insane here trying to figure out why. I played with the spacial and temporal settings in graphedit and that helped a little bit, and I can almost get used to it, but as soon I change TV modes from SVideo input to Cable the image difference becomes very clear. Normal TV looks better, much better. Sage looks almost out of focus b/c it's blurry, I find myself squinting at it.

I have another question, although I appreciate any responses on live TV quality that I can get, just don't ask me to check splitters or try the tweak tool, I've already tried the basics. Anyway, my other question. If I got digital cable, I'd have to use the cable box. Which is the DCT2000. I'm assuming it would connect to my PVR150 through SVideo. Do you think this would help?

[Wheemer]

No matter what you do, it will never look as good as straight to the tv... However with a better video card, namely an FX 5XXX series, and the digital cable box, things will improve alot. I'm not exactly sure about the PVR 150s, but with my PVR 250s turning off the filtering and putting the registry sharpness at max has made a big difference.

Apparently there is a registry that make the changes for the PVR 150 stick/save. Have you made sure that's set? When you adjust the registry and restart, have the settings remained as you set them? Or do they get reset?

I am currently very happy with my picture quality, it seems perfect to me unless I directly compare it to straight to the tv. But considering the benifits of running Sage, the slight quality loss it completely acceptable to me. I would never watch tv any other way.

[scbundy]

Yup tried all the reg settings using the Tweak Tool. Reboot, reloaded Sage and nothing looked any better.

I cranked the Sharpness setting every place I found it and it makes no difference at all. The value does stick, b/c I've checked the reg settings after the reboot and it's there. I don't know why it isn't looking any sharper.

The PVR 150 doesn't have an option for "disable filter". I wish it were that simple. It appears to just enable it without the option to turn it off. I've checked everywhere, asked in a dozen forums. If somebody knows how to disable it, I'd love to hear from them. I'd especially like to know why after maxing out sharpness in the Tweak Tool, Graphedit and Sage there was no change at all.

[Wheemer]

Well I actually ment setting the filtering to 0

[scbundy]

Where do you do that? Is that a Tweak Tool option? I don't know if it's in the 150/500 panel.

If you're talking about the pre-filtering option you can add into the Sage.properties file where you can create your own Recording Quality option and say |disablefilter\=0. Well, I've tried that and it has 0 effect on the image quality.

[Wheemer]

As far as I know the prefiltering can be adjusted with the tweak tool, under the advanced... static temporal filter... it defaults to 8 so make sure it's down to 0

and you need to make sure this value is set in the registryL [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hcwPP2\DriverData] " HcwSaveEncoderSettings "=dword:00000001

But I think you've already done this...

[scbundy]

Ya I've done this, previously with the tweak tool and again with graphedit Although with graphedit you can see the results in realtime while Sage is running in a window (for everything except sharpness, that slider had no effect, how ironic, since it's the only one I need). I'll double check tonight that the values are stuck in the registry.

I should add that the quality is close, there is a level of sharpness missing that I can't get past. I was mislead when I got into this. Someone told me that the quality difference between the two would be neglegable. They were wrong. I think my Freevo is about to become my wife's PC for email since an Athlon 2000+ with a Geforce 4200 is a bit underpowered as a gaming rig. And I was so looking forward to having Sage fully up and running and being my primary source for TV. As it is, at best, it's going to be a quick way to watch mpg's from my video camera and save the burning to DVD process, and for taping old episodes of Family Guy and South Park that air at 2am, since quality isn't much of an issue with those shows.

I thought about getting Digital Cable, to see if I could get a quality increase having my PVR150 input be Svideo instead of Coax, however, I quickly realized that if I did this I'd lose dual tuning abilities. Not worth the trade off.

[Wheemer]

Well, not that this will change your mind or anything, but I found the quality difference between regular cable to the tv and with sage in the mix to be much greater than after I added digital cable... Now the difference is not so much and very acceptable.

[scbundy]

That's what I expected, but the hardest part about this is getting the "sell" into my wife. I have Sage recording a dozen different shows all over the place. If I have to tell her that she can't watch show A because Sage is recording show B at that moment, well this ain't going to work. I blame the cable companies and wanting 4 times the price for dual tuner boxes.

Anyway, this is probably where my Sage adventure ends. I have one more option left and that's just further tweaking my ffdshow settings to see if I can scrape an inch more quality out of it, but given the luck I've had with that so far, I don't have my hopes up.

BTW I read a web site that gave some pretty good ffdshow settings to try as a default, and that guy was setting his ffdshow resolution to 1440x960. My god, when I tried that my performance dropped to around 1fps. The dude must have a 4Ghz machine for his Freevo, that's just crazy.

[scbundy]

I GOT IT!

I had to max out the sharpness value in 3 places (tweak tool, graphedit and SageTV), and decrease the temporal slider to 0 in both the tweak tool and graphedit. Then reboot and make sure all my changes in those places stuck. Don't ask me why I had to do it in all of them. Don't ask me why there are 3 different sharpness values that are independent of eachother, but there are and all needed to be changed. So now, the difference between Sage and normal TV is quite small and negligable. Thx for your help everyone.