Strange Ghosting on Fox recordings.

[Juncti]

Just curious if anyone else has had a similar problem or any luck in avoiding this. For the past month or so everything recorded on Fox get's a slightly blurry image that trails anytime there's movement. Really annoying in Sunday football games, but also bad in just regular TV.

In football if someone is running there is a trail of them across the screen, or if a character on a tv show moves their head, a trail follows the movement until the movement stops. Really weird that it only happens on this one channel and it just started happening recently. I was running version 2 and having this issue, just upgraded to 4 and still having it. So I think it's the channel but no idea how to fix it. Can a channel be fine tuned?

[aperry]

What happens if you watch that channel straight from the cable? Does it do the same thing?

[bling_bling_vr6]

Especially the simpsons, but other shows such as supernatural as well. Its very weird, because I record Law&Order on TNT and NBC and the video looks great, but when I record Fox it always has lots of ghosting. At first I thought it was the 3D acceleration that was turned on for a while, but even turning that off doesn't seem to make a difference. I haven't done a huge amount of troubleshooting on this, but if anyone has resolved this or has any ideas, I'd appreciate it.

[Jackal24]

My guess is one of two things:

1) You are getting compression artifacts from your cable and this happens whether you use Sage or just hook up a tv straight to the cable box. Not much you can do except complain to the cable company.

2) Somehow the video is being slightly corrupted in the conversion process. Assuming you have digital cable, the digital cable is being converted to analog, then back to digital by your capture card. The multiple conversions may be interfering with each other somehow, and your cable company may be using a slightly better/worse compression for FOX than TNT, etc. About the only way I can see to fix this is to try a different video capture card (preferably a different chipset one).

[bling_bling_vr6]

But then i should be seeing that type of ghosting even without recording that channel on my PVR right? When I watch live TV on Ch 11 or Fox the porblem doesn't seem to be happening, or at least it looks a lot better than in the recordings.

I've read in some other posts that there may be issues with using the NVIDIA codec (i'm using the latest one, I purchased it last month) or with SP2...I recently upgraded my system and am using WinXP sp2. I've tried switching to the Default codecs and the problem still remains.

Here's my config:

Sage 4.1 (advanced features disabled)
3d Acceleration Enabled
Using MALORE.stv
NVIDIA Geforce 5600 Ultra
Gigabyte 7N400S NFORCE Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 3000+
768MB DDR 400 RAM
Seagate 250MB HD

[dvd_maniac]

It is probably a decoder issue. Try playing it back on another PC, different Software player, burn to DVD-r and pop it in a STB dvd player or like previously mentioned, watch straight from cable box.

I have never had a ghosting problem in my Living room until recently. I bought a new HDTV to replace an old Standard Def TV and had to play around with the Video playback settings to get the ghosting to go away...

[Jackal24]

Originally Posted by bling_bling_vr6

But then i should be seeing that type of ghosting even without recording that channel on my PVR right? When I watch live TV on Ch 11 or Fox the porblem doesn't seem to be happening, or at least it looks a lot better than in the recordings.

If you mean live TV as in the TV is hooked directly to the cable box, then the type 1 (as i posted above) errors would show up, but not the type 2. If you are still using Sage to watch live tv, you are actually watching a recording that is being made right now, so there shouldn't be any difference.

[Jackal24]

Try playing the recorded files in windows media player and see if you are getting the same result.

[bling_bling_vr6]

Will try tonite and update everyone on what i see.

[Juncti]

Wow, this thread came back from the dead. I forgot all about it.

After football season the problem just seemed to disappear. Never had much time to tweak and find a cure with all the chaos in the city right now, so I just left it be.

Haven't seen the ghosting in ages (at least since the debut of 24) and I haven't updated or changed a thing. Just kinda fixed itself.

Prison Break which was another notorious ghoster on my system is also clear each week.

Not sure what happened to make it work again, but I'm not about to complain

[bling_bling_vr6]

Could you send me your config so I can compare it to mine? Maybe then I can figure out how to get rid of this ghosting. Mine still does it like crazy on prison break...just looks awful.

[Juncti]

Be happy to if you can tell me what exactly I'm sending. I pretty much use Sage right out the box so to speak. So not sure what file contains what you're looking for.

Let me know and I'll shoot it over.

[bling_bling_vr6]

OK, after some troubleshooting this weekend, I've figured out what the problem with the gosting is and where its coming from. Jackal24 was right the problem lies with my cable provider. I have Champion Broadband and am pretty happy with them, and the only issue i've been having was the ghosting on Channel 11 or FOX TV. After some further investigating, I found that the ghosting gets worse or better depending on the broadcast, some shows (i.e. the simpsons) are especially bad, while others such as the FOX 11 NEWS don't have as much ghosting. The ghosting occurs even during live recordings or if I'm watching SageTV as it is recording, I never noticed it because whenever I was watching LiveTV the ghosting wouldn't be as bad as when I was watching the previously recorded simpsons for instance. I also found that there is even a slight bit of ghosting when I connect my tv directly to the cable box using coax and viewing fox via the tv's ch3, so I'm sure the problem lies with my cable provider. Furthermore I tested to see if the problem occured on FoxHD and it does not. My current workaround is to disable CH11 in the channel setup and enable FOXHD. The picture is cut off on the sides and at the top and bottom, but at least there isn't any ghosting. Thanks all for your input.