Sage pq on HDTV

[Jesse]

Hello All,

I am considering upgrading to HDTV. I have a buddy with a Sony HDTV (big, like 50 or 60 inches, not sure which model) and SDTV looks very poor on this thing. He informs me that SDTV, in general, looks bad on HDTV sets. I am just wondering how sage looks on an HD set. Comments??


Thanks,

Jesse

[src666]

It looks just about as good as ReplayTV, or just the standard Analog/Digital cable signal. Any time you blow a low-resolution signal up that large, you are going to start seeing a lot more flaws in the image than you would on a smaller TV.

All analog sources look "better" on my 36" and 27" TV's, because that's the signal that those TV's were designed for. On my 57" HD set, they are tollerable, but nothing that I would call "good". You can either buy for today (SDTV), or buy for the future (HD).

[nielm]

Low quality pictures look bad on high quality displays (because the display shows up all the defects in the picture)... Just as viewing a 640x480 JPG looks terrible zoomed to a 1280x1024 on a PC monitor.

[stanger89]

On an HDTV set, SageTV can look as good as anything else. How good that is will be dependent on the quality of your signal. A good SD signal, while not HD quality, can come close to DVD quality.

[mlbdude]

SD on my HDTV with Sage looks like crap. However, SD looks like crap to me from any program or cable box compared to HD .

[mikejaner]

Agreed.
I even ran tests of plugging the component output of my DirecTV boxes to my TV and switching back and fourth between SageTV and the Sat Box, and the quality is the same, so basically no loss, so to speak.
Now keep in mind this is with the Nvidia decoders and Svideo input to the Hauppauge Cards with all of the temporal blur settings etc... off.
That said , the actual interface of Sage looks great at Hidef resolutions.

[Crazedz]

Yeah if your going to go with a HD tv that big the SD broadcasts are just not going to look good however the HD broadcasts will look great. You could always get a HD tuner card like the fusion 3 or 5 or the a180 or the HDtvwonder all of which work with stealths hdne network encoder plugin for sage to record hd programs however Qam is still not working stealth hasn't gotten to it yet last i heard so only OTA works.

Anyway SD does look better on smaller HDtv sets but still not as good as HD does, Hd just plain has more detail and higher quality. I just hope HD doesn't get all F'ed up with the entertainment industries atempts to put all kinds of DRM and flags all over it till it's essentually useless and undesierable to the public which they seem bound and determined to try to do.

Anyway excuse the rant it was getting off the subject anyway HDtv is popping up in sage but is still in beta so don't expect a bug free solid experience but overall it has been working pretty good at this point.

[flavius]

My Sage server records everything in standard DVD quality - and the HTPC is connected via HDMI. If the signal from the server set-top box is good - like all the premium channels, the recording will look almost as good on my plasma as viewed using the HD set-top box. That's out of the box (see sig) - no pun intended.

I haven't done any tweaking yet. HD broadcasts are something else, though.

[InsertHere]

Running a Sony 50" HD set, HDMI from HTPC to TV, everything recording in MPEG Max Quality. SD picture through Sage appears to be as good as directly from DirecTV box to TV. The imperfections are more noticeable than they were on smaller TV though. So I guess I would agree that the overall quality of SD degraded slightly with the larger screen.

Haven't attempted HD through Sage yet, waiting for an easier setup. This thing already seems to run my life!