Is picture quality a function of Computer Uptime?

[jominor]

I posted about how much better the quality was after switching to the AIW DVD Player. However, the next day, I noticed that the picture looked much worse. After trying all the other decoders, they all looked worse.

My wife commented on this, giving me the "You changed something and now it looks worse. Why do you keeping messing with it?" look. "Hey," I said, " I didn't do anything. It was looking like this all day."

I puzzled over this switching stuff decoder type, and restarting Sage, and remembered rebooting after installing the AIW drivers, so I rebooted.

Lo and behold, the quality was again high. Again, she and I thought that the picture was better than the standard signal.

I did experiment with mapping the aspect ratio to buttons to switch while watching Divx movies, but after that reboot, this didn't seem to affect anything.

So my question, has anyone experience a degradation of picture quality when Sage(or any PVR software)has been up for several hours? Or perhaps, when using it to view recorded shows, divx, and "Live" tv, understanding how Sage treats live tv.

Again, the quality looked awesome one day. Looked washed out the next(even after sleep and Sage restarts), but looked great after a reboot.

[JJarmoc]

Sometimes I've noticed that after running other apps which are video-card heavy (games, streaming video, etc..) Sage's quality will drop considerably. It seems as though sage gets stuck on whatever codec the other app loads.

[Mike Young]

I never notice any change in quality, but both my Sage machines are dedicated to only Sage.
What I have noticed is that I have a switchbox between my Main Computer and the Sage Server, if I flip back and forth the video on the Main, which is much higher res. tends to get fuzzy, a reboot will fix. Dont know if you might be experiencing something similar.

mike/

[nielm]

I have not noticed a degradation in quality on *playback*, but I have noticed it in recordings -- ie it is the recording that deteriorates in quality over time.

In my case it is because the PVR-250 auto-adjusts its encoding parameters over time, and increases the contrast and color saturation to an unacceptable level.

Rebooting, or getting the PVR-250 properties window up in detailed setup, and resetting the 'video proc amp' settings to default fixes it for me...

I keep on meaning to look for a method of fixing these settings to known-good values, but keep on getting distracted!