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Posted by JW on July 29, 2005, 7:34 pm
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When using a Cable or Satellite STB you are sending video to your MCE system
with either COAX or S-video (hopefully S-video since that is of much better
quality). In any case you are sending NTSC standard 480i video. Your
tuner/video capture card then encodes this into MPEG2 720x480i format using
an inexpensive encoder chip. When you play this back your DVD Decoder
decodes this video and sends it to your graphics card in 480p format. The
quality of the conversion from 480i to 480p is dependent on the quality of
your DVD Decoder and the hardware acceleration it can obtain from your
graphics card. Then the 480p video is sent to your graphics card which, if
required, upscales it to the output resolution of your choice. The quality
of this upscaling is dependent on the capabilities of the graphics card and
its drivers.
All of these operations can degrade the PQ significantly from that which is
obtained by going directly from your cable or satellite STB to your TV.
You might want to go to the NVIDIA.com Website and read about their
PureVideo technology which describes what techniques NVIDIA is now providing
to try and insure that you can get the same picture quality using a PC as by
going direct.
Only suggestion is to be sure you are using the latest MCE drivers from the
Hauppauge Website and always use the "Best" recording option.
> Can anyone tell me what the best capture card is for picture quality (not
> ATI HDTV card). I have used several of the Hauppauge cards and am just
> not really happy with the quality of the live video. I have used both
> digital cable boxes and satellite boxes as the input source, but when
> displaying on a plasma TV you just see a very grainy look to the video
> output from the MCE unit and considerable difference from the output of of
> the cable or satellite box directly to the plasma.
>
> So, has anyone done any tests, or does anyone have any personal experience
> that can help me to get a better picture?
>
> Any input is welcome, thanks.
>
> Craig
>
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