Simple and highest picture quality "Live TV" setup

[onion]

There is a problem with Beyond TV...

When you watch Live TV through BeyondTV the picture quality is equal to the set recording quality!!...this is NOT good. When I want to watch TV I want to see the best possible picture and I'm sure others do also. Recording something is a different story and sacrificing a little quality for hard drive space its perfectly fine.

The way it should be
-------------------------

There (IMO) should be TWO quality setting.
One for recording, which you set conservatively to your liking or avaliable hard drive space.
One for watching Live TV which of course you would set to MAX all the time because who wouldn't want to watch Live TV at MAX picture quality?
When it is time to permanently record something BeyondTV would default to the "recording" quality setting automatically.

That is the way it should be....

The way it is now is if you want the best Live TV picture quality you must first create a new profile.

Go to the Web Admin (http://localhost:8129/Default.aspx in your web browser) -->Settings -->Recording Pref.
Next to Default Quality click "List all Qualities"
Edit the "fair" quality (setting since I'm sure noone uses it) as follows.

Name : Live TV
Type : MPEG 2
Dimensions : 720x480 or 480x480 (your choice)
Average Video bitrate 12000 kilobits per second (thats the max for my PVR 150 card)
Leave variable bitrate unchecked

So now in Beyond TV there will be a "Live TV" profile in the recording quality settings which will give you the absolute best Live TV picture quality.

When you want to record something permanently simply change the the Best or Better recording profile since the Live TVs 12000 kilobits per second will eat up your hard drive. (That is what bugs me the most. Why cant there be two settings so you don't have to switch back and forth ...)

Also in the Web Admin under settings/recording preferences edit the time shift setting to 5000 so that you can rewind far back into a show you are watching on Live TV.

Install the Nvidia DVD codec!

At 12000 kilobits per second you can REALLY see how well a codec performs. The difference between the Nvidia and snapstream codec is stunning!

The question is..Why dosnt Beyond TV have TWO quality settings so you dont have to switch back and forth....

[Deuce911]

Deleted

[nanook105]

Having separate recording and live TV settings would be excellent. Not sure why they don't have that yet. You can work around it if you set the highest quality as the default, and then either showsqueeze everything or override all of the recordings to a lower quality when you add them, but that is a PITA.

[wxboy]

how do you find out what the maximum is for your card. I have just a WinTV card with software encoding. Also, I can't tell if it has worked or not.

[nanook105]

Originally Posted by wxboy

how do you find out what the maximum is for your card. I have just a WinTV card with software encoding. Also, I can't tell if it has worked or not.

I would search on shspvr.com for your specific card.

[wxboy]

I just looked. There is nothing about my card on shspvr.com

[nanook105]

I assume that you have a wintv-go card.

I think with the intro of the PVR150 and PVR500 that it got moved to the other forum:
http://www.shspvr.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=27

You can also check the documentation for your card at hauppauge. A quick look at the doc seems to indicate a max of 320X240.

Have you tried the different default qualities avaulable from BTV ? If you are looking for a quality recording/live TV, then you will want to replace that board with one of the PVR (hardware) cards.

[BenH]

For a Software tuner card the max resolution and bitrate is hardware related . 352x480 or 480x480 is a good mpeg2 resolution for software encodeing on decent hardware above 2GHZ cpu speed . At those resolution 10MBs may look like 12Mbs . I use 3.5Mbs . I am trying to find the best to fit on DVD 2 hrs - the lazy way without a calculator. A calculator tells you exactly what to set to fit X in 4.4Mbs single layer dvd .