So Close!!!!

[ajrosen]

After investing in a Hauppauge PVR-350 and upgrading to the full version of BTV, I was pretty disapointed in the results. Packed the computer up, and put it back in the office. Plugged in the cable connection just for the heck of it. Last night, I went out for dinner, and missed the simpsons. I figured I'd burn the file BTV had recorded to DVD to watch it on the real TV.

WOW!!! What a different an S-video cable can make! The quality was great! None of the problems I had been having. I burned a couple other videos that I had recorded and had more great results. So now I know that it's not the capture card or the software giving me problems - it's somewhere in the output process.

So now I am hooking the PC to the TV via s-video. The picture is much much better, but it's still not perfect. I'm still having some troubles - namely, some ghosting on movement, and some color artifacts/blockiness.

Here is my system:
Athlon XP 2100+
Nvidia GForce4 Ti4200
PVR-350
Plenty of HD space, defragged

My BTV settings:
Recording settings as pasted below:
Running the Intervideo NonCSS Decoder


Any help would be appreciated. Better video out? Different video decoder? I tried the NVidia decoder, but I hate the startup time involved with it. I'm so close to this working great... just a bit more tweaking to go.

Thanks for the help!!!

[MonsterHTPC]

There are a few settings changes that you can make. This thread is a good start.

http://discuss2.snapstream.com/vb/sh...threadid=11998

[MarkTO]

Do you notice any of the ghosting or color artifact blockiness if you watch the recorded program on your computer monitor? If not then it is most likely your TV-out and not your recording settings.

Ghosting could be caused by a bad S-video cable but probably not the color blockiness. Connect the same S-video cable to a DVD player to see if it is causing ghosting. Since you said it is ghosting on movement this could be caused by the wrong deinterlacing setting. First make sure your scan frequency is set to 60 Hz and your output resolution is 640x480. This will cause flickering on a computer monitor but is correct for a TV. Next turn off deinterlacing since a TV is an interlaced display deinterlacing does not help.

I am not sure but I think the Ti4200 uses third party TV-out chips made by Philips or Conexant which are not always the best. The new Nvidia FX line of cards have excellent TV-out quality even if they are not the fastest game cards. They also have easy to adjust settings so that you can get your picture to fit perfectly on your TV screen.

I have noticed color banding/blockiness when using vga to TV converters and older ATI/Nvidia cards but the latest generation (Radeon or FX) of cards seem to do a good job.

Good luck.