Vertical Ghosting...

[nethawk]

67 degrees! That's nuts! It's like 80 at night over here! I don't really see the ghosting but it may be difficult to see in a capture. I do believe you, I don't think your crazy or anything for believing in screen ghosts . Call the cable company though, really.

[kny3twalker]

it is a cable issue
my local analogue cable has recently just gone to crap take a look at it


I do not know if this is because I split my cable line
or what
but it just started doing this
and I have yet to mess with it


Southwestern Bell Cable

[Frunobulax]

I suppose so...<sigh>

You shouldn't be watching the misadventures of those two stupid twits, anyway...

[kny3twalker]

they are funny
and HOT!!!

I wish I knew what they did or I did
but I am going to look at it this weekend
summer school is out for about a week or so then I go back for my next class

also wanted to show a picture from my DirecTV service from also Southwestern Bell Cable

also hopefully jesse james is man enough for you

[Frunobulax]

I also use BTV, and my Adaptec Videoh! DVD Media Center USB 2.0 unit handles the "ghosting" a lot better than the Hauppauge 250 PCI. It must have something to do with the default settings that the Adaptec uses for basic encoding. I'm going to try to tweak the 250 a little more to see if I can get closer to the image that the Adaptec displays.

Summer school? Gawd, I'm old.

Jesse James?! Hell, Wyatt Earp couldn't even park my car!

[kny3twalker]

jesse james is on that motorcycle and yes he is related
but he builds hand made bikes

no ghosting in that image though

also found a loos cable here
wonder how the DirecTV still did ok?

[Frunobulax]

Scrubs -- now THERE'S a great show!

[mls]

Originally posted by Frunobulax
Maybe I'm being too anal about this ghosting issue (don't everybody nod vigorously at once!)

Attached is a screen capture that should demonstrate what I'm seeing. Keep in mind that I'm viewing on a 19" PC monitor which shows no ghosting artifacts otherwise.

From what I see from the picture you say has "ghosting" it is not. Rather, it appears to be what is called "ringing". This used to be a common problem in video amplifier circuits in older TV's.

What happens if if the video goes extremely negative voltage (bright white) and then turns off the circuits produce over bounces positive, then back negative, positive, neg, etc. like echoes slowly decaying each time.

Not sure just why you are getting this with the cards you mention, but could be do to an overly strong signal. As such, you might try putting a 10 or 20db attenuator in the input line. Radio Shack used to have those resonable. They also had a variable one, but I've never used that one.

Otherwise, as other have suggested, call your cable company and have a guy come out and check the signal levels and quality themselves since that sort of problem really should not be yours to take care of to start with.

[Frunobulax]

Thanks, mls. I tried a 20db variable attenuator form Radio Shack, but that didn't seem to help. I'll keep working on it...

[Jeraden]

I have a similar problem. I don't quite have the ghosting that you do, but its similar. My problem is that its like the colors don't line up exactly. For example if I had a white square, the left edge would be greenish and the right edge would be reddish. Like the red/blue/green aren't lining up correctly. I have dish network and am feeding a pvr250 roslyn via s-video. The result is that the picture is slighly blurry due to the misconvergence of the colors, plus its just annoying to look at.

I've never noticed the problem on regular tv from the dish directly, so I assume its the pvr250 card doing it.

[abiharbani]

Jeraden, I too have the same problem as yours. I'm using Avermedia m150 and I've been dying to buy PVR-250 to get a better picture. But you have a 250 Roslyn.

Right now my workaround is to use chroma offset from ffdshow of -2, +2. I'm planning to buy a PVR-250 to do A/B and return it if PQ doesn't improve much.

I still have slight ghosting that can be eliminated by using ffdshow dering + nic's. But it eats too much cpu, plus it blurrs the picture a little too much for my taste.

[abiharbani]

Just an update on my m150... I switched my splitter with a Regal splitter, swapped pci cards so that SBLive is next to AGP and m150 is on the other end.

The picture has never been cleaner than this. I don't think I'll be out spending some $ for PVR-250. With Denoise3D it looks like digital tv.

[mls]

Originally posted by abiharbani
Just an update on my m150... I switched my splitter with a Regal splitter, swapped pci cards so that SBLive is next to AGP and m150 is on the other end.

That is another issue the many people may not be aware of. It is possible the the "ghosting" or "ringing" problem can be caused by signals from the video output card leaking back into other cards next to them.

Some people have a different problem with the sound card picking up hiss and buzz from their video or hard drive controller cards.

Others have had problems with 56K modem cards picking up hash and not working properly when placed next to certain other cards.

It is a good idea to leave an open card slot between cards whenever possible to avoid these problems, but that is not always possible.

It all depends how well the components on each card are layed out and shielded. So, yes, sometimes just moving the cards around to different slots does clear up other interference problems.

Glad that worked in your situation.

[Frunobulax]

I bought a couple of terminating resistors yesterday, so in the morning I'll try capping a couple of unused connections and see how that goes. I found a description of ringing in a Google search that described exactly what I've been seeing...

[mls]

Yes, that could very well be another source of stray leaking signals. All un-used cable connections should always have terminators put on them.

Sorry if I keep forgetting that most people do not know the correct way of doing cable installations. I've got a good friend in the TV repair and cable business that has taught me how to do that stuff correctly, and I often forget that others do not have the knowledge I've been lucky enough to have learned from him.

SIDE NOTE: His shop is set up to handle 100 TV's in the display room. Think you got problems, try that sometime lol.

[Frunobulax]

Well, I installed the terminating resistors to two unused outlets in the cable box outside, and installed a 6db attenuator between my VCR and the TV card. Absolutely no visible change in image quality. This really sucks; I may actually have to ask a Comcast tech about the problem. Hopefully, whoever I speak to will be knowledgeable...<fingers crossed>

BTW, I also tried changing the TV card slot in the PC, but that didn't do anything either. Even the USB 2.0 version of the WinTV 250 I had once showed the same "ringing" problem.

[mls]

I got one last idea for you to try/check which had cause another type of problem with my USB2.

Do you have an antenna connected to the USB2's FM antenna input? If so, disconnect it and put a terminator on that input.

I had one channel that had interference going on and off and it turned out to be caused by the FM antenna picking up a pager signal and leaking it over to the TV tuner inside the USB2.

Since I don't use the FM, I had totally forgetten about this being another possible source of your problem.

[Frunobulax]

I don't have the USB 2.0 unit anymore.

I just reduced some of the sharpness in the image using the color calibration feature of SageTV, and that has alleviated the problem a lot, at the cost of a little softness of the image. I can definitely live with that for a while...

[mls]

Originally posted by Frunobulax
I just reduced some of the sharpness in the image using the color calibration feature of SageTV, and that has alleviated the problem a lot, at the cost of a little softness of the image. I can definitely live with that for a while...

Ah... then the "ringing" was in the actual video circuitry (hardware) and not from outside problems.

For some reason, my cable co. seems to have everything excessively over processed. The blacks and low greys are all totally black, the whites are overloaded, and the color over saturated. Sometimes that does give the 'illusion" of a better looking picture, but I personaly don't like things overloaded like that. This may also have been some small part of your problem.

Anyway, glad you did finally find some "reasonably tolerable" work around. Now that you done that, maybe you might want to tweak some of the other settings for brightness, contrast, and color a bit to make things look a bit less washed out.

Most people don't realize that with a little adjustment of those settings they can make almost anything look good (or at least better).

Years ago when I worked at a TV shop where we sold 3 different brands of TV's, a couple came in and thought they liked the picture on one specific brand better then the others... So, I went over to the others and re-adjusted those settings. Then they couldn't make up there mind because all 3 looked the same and left to think about what to buy.

Of course, when the boss found out about it I was severely repremanded and told not to ever do that again because he had lost a sale.

Ah, the little things in life can cause so many problems lol.

[Frunobulax]

I'm not so sure that the ringing was in the video circuitry, but softening the image a bit did help mask the effects.