Avermedia M150 Quality

[digpower]

I recently installed two Avermedia M150 cards in my system but the quality of live TV is terrible. I have tried updated drivers for Avermedia, installed many different decoders from PowerDVD/Intervideo/Elecard and none of them produce anywhere near reasonable quality. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[flavius]

I have one, and I can't see any difference to my PVR-250. What M150 exactly (chipset) do you have. I remember vaguely, there was a model that wasn't quite as a good, but I'm not entirely sure about that. You can find the chipset in the BTV log. Are the recordings better? What's the quality you are using? The drivers you should use are in zip called 'M150a'?
And - could the problem be the source? You could also download the Sage Trial and see how that does ..

[digpower]

I dont know exacly what chipset it is but I will check when I get a chance. Its the quality of live TV, it is so blury and pixelated you cant recognize anything. I checked the source and it is good just not though the M150 cards. I already did download Sage and it looks worse (if thats possible) than Beyond TV did. I used the drivers off of avermedia.com support site if thats the ones you are talking about.

[optikhog]

What are you using for playback? e.g. what is your PC and decoder? Also, what quality setting are you using?

I have a pair of the m150s using the m150a driver and have seen oddities when not using the 'Best' mpeg2 encoding option...

[flavius]

What I can see on the avermedia site seems to be a new set of drivers. If nobody else will during the day, I'm going to upload the drivers I'm using.

[digpower]

Are you refering to the quality in the web interface? I havent gone in and changed anything there. I have just messed with the settings in Viewscape to see if the quality changes. As far as decoders go I have tried the Default, PowerDVD, WinDVD, and a few others I cant remember off the top of my head. All I know is the quality is VERY grainy no matter what decoder I choose.
System is:
P4 1.8
512MB
2 M150 Cards
Geforce 3 Ti200 128MB
XP Pro SP1

[flavius]

You could try the following: goto the webadmin, settings, recording. You should find an entry about encoding or something that says default. Try 'basic'.

[optikhog]

My reference was to the recording quality - the default setting is Fair, which isn't always nice with the m150 - change this to BEST and try it again. Also, Flavius' recommendation may save you some headaches down the road.

[digpower]

I will give these suggestions a try and let you know what happens. What decoder should I be using with the M150? The default Snapstream or something else?

[flavius]

At this point it doesn't really matter. The ones that come with snapstream should be fine for now.

[nanook105]

Originally Posted by digpower

I will give these suggestions a try and let you know what happens. What decoder should I be using with the M150? The default Snapstream or something else?

You should try them all to see which one works best for you

[flavius]

Can't upload the file. Exceeds 2 MB limit. PM your email if you're interested and I'll put it in an email.

[digpower]

Well I have tried everything that has been suggested with no better results. I even formatted and installed Windows and all the drivers fresh and it still looks very bad. I dont understand. I used to have a PVR 150 and it looked very good compared to these cards. At wits end.

[flavius]

Sorry to hear that. I assume you used the drivers I sent.
How about the chipset? From my log:
"[1/25/2005 23:00:02] Creating card builder for 'Conexant 2388x Video Capture with MPEG2 Encoder"