picture quality questions

[mydreamhost]

I have just purchased the program and love it so far.
What I do want to know is how to make the picture look like the origional source.

I am using the pinnacle pro tv card and a radeon 9700 video card.
I also use a tivo setup, and obviously when i'm watching tv with my tivo, the picture is exactly the same quality as the source.

I tried a test recording last night at the highest dvd quality setting available. I was kinda dismayed when I noticed that the output was not upto the quality of my input.

I then burned a dvd of the program and played it in my standalone player. Once again I was shocked that it was not the same quality as my television, close but not really. It did however look better on my tv using the dvd I burned vs. my flatpanel monitor (samsung 150mp).

Any suggestions?

2. cpu% problems.
I noticed that when running the program especiallly when in the highest level that my cpu is very very high i.e. 90% and up, even when not recording, but just viewing.
I run a PIV 3.0 with 1.5g 400 mhz ram, and cheatah scsi hd raid 5+1 raid system.

I cannot believe that my tivo has anywhere near the processing power as my main pc yet it seems to always work ok.

What do I need to do in order to optimize my pc to either watch or record shows while I am working on other apps?
This part is what really amazes me, and honestly I wonder what the customers running a standard pIII or PIV do in order to survive using this software.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance

[PBMax]

Your tivo has a hardware encoder. PVS 3.0 uses software to encode the video. So when you are encoding without watching you are using a pecentage of your cpu to just encode. When you are watching TV you are Encoding and also Decoding at the same time. This is why your cpu usage rises. The use of a hardware encoder reduces the CPU load significantly. Our early ALPHA tests on hardware encoding reduces the CPU load of a 1.4 Ghz machine to about 5-8%. When you watch a show this increases to about 60% because once again we are decoding the video.

What quality settings are you using and what format mpeg or wmv.

[mydreamhost]

Originally posted by PBMax
Your tivo has a hardware encoder. PVS 3.0 uses software to encode the video. So when you are encoding without watching you are using a pecentage of your cpu to just encode. When you are watching TV you are Encoding and also Decoding at the same time. This is why your cpu usage rises. The use of a hardware encoder reduces the CPU load significantly. Our early ALPHA tests on hardware encoding reduces the CPU load of a 1.4 Ghz machine to about 5-8%. When you watch a show this increases to about 60% because once again we are decoding the video.

What quality settings are you using and what format mpeg or wmv.

I recorded last night in mpeg2 dvd quality. I have been trying to keep it at the maximum to get the best picture quality even while watching. However no matter what setting I put it at the quality is not at what the tivo is doing for me. Is that due to my tv card, or do you think software codecs?

As far as I understand my pinnacle tvpro card does do hardware decoding. How do I turn this feature on in the software as to relieve the stress on the cpu? It seems that should be much easier for watching than having snapstream encode it, as it would then really only have to do a passthrough of the video.

[mydreamhost]

ok i ran another test tonight, and this one came out worse than the first.
I set to record an hour long show at the mpeg2 ntscdvdreadylowres setting.

Now when I go back to watch it.. not only is the picture somewhat grainy and pixelated, but it also has horizontal shifting going on in the picture itself.
The best way to describe it is if you cut the picture horizontally in 20 pixel increments at 1024 setting and cut them in rows all the way down and did a column shift of 3 pixels.

It is not even in the ballpark of dvd ready ntsc. What do you think is going on?

[rkuo]

Have you tried creating some customized recording qualities? Upping the bitrate and increasing the motion precision of the higher quality settings can help a lot. You might also try going to the web admin and configure the advanced settings for your video source. Most cards have brightness and contrast controls for the source which can help adjust the incoming image.

Also, as PBMax noted, the capture hardware has a lot to do with the way recordings come out.