AIW 8500DV - disappointing Tuner - Could something be wrong?

[MisterMac9]

Just got a new AIW 8500DV. I connected cable TV to the AIW's coax cable input to display TV on my 17" monitor, with the intent of recording TV to the hard drive TiVO style. The picture on the monitor is not nearly as good as when I play the same channel on the 24" TV that I have sitting in the same room.

When I installed this, I split the cable coming out of the wall with a 2-way splitter and ran one cable to the TV and one to the AIW. To be sure the problem wasn't just a bad cable between the splitter and the AIW, I swapped the cables going to the TV and the AIW but the picture on the monitor is still poor compared to the TV. It looks similar to a low quality VCD. The cable service is analog and the picture on the TV looks fine, although not of DVD quality of course.

Any suggestions on what to try to improve the cable TV picture on the monitor?

EDIT: I should add, that when I say it looks bad, I have the ATI TV player in full screen mode (I'm running the desktop at 1024x768 32 bit 85hz refresh under Win XP Pro). If I switch the TV player to a 640x480 window, it looks better though, still not as good as the TV.

 

[Viper96720]

Your just seeing what you can't see on a television. Any problems with the signal shows up on a monitor. Nothing's wrong that's normal.

 

[jamie2833]

also you could try plugging the cable through a VCR first? i usually get a better picture through my video for some reason.

you could also try a signal power booster, i think you can buy one of these for about 10 bucks or so (i got mine for £10 in england) and if you have a weak signal it will help no end, for example if you are using a splitter cable and 2 TV's on at the same time, i do this with my sisters room, i run the cable from the antenna into my signal power booster, then with one of the outputs on it runs into my sisters room, and with another output on the signal power booster goes into my VCR first so i get a great picture and so does my sister, when we both have the same channel on as well.

she used to get poor quality on her TV when i was watching TV at the same time because i was using the 'Y' splitter and we were using long cables.

hope this might help, it's worth a try anyway

 

[xpeter]

I think the poor quality of the TV tuner on PC is normal thing. I have a Pinnacle PC TV Pro and
the quality is also poor compared to the television. I am running Win XP at 1280x1024@85Hz
and the full screen mode is just bad with many interfering lines. I think that the TV tuner in PC
is much more sensitive on the intereference than the normaln in TV. I played a little bid with
the cable plugs and bocame a noticable better picture but not as good as on TV. The TV signal
is limited to the quality that can the TV reproduce but the PC and it's monitor is capable
of much higher resulutions and picture quality.

 

[Wolfsraider]

Originally posted by: xpeter
I think the poor quality of the TV tuner on PC is normal thing. I have a Pinnacle PC TV Pro and
the quality is also poor compared to the television. I am running Win XP at 1280x1024@85Hz
and the full screen mode is just bad with many interfering lines. I think that the TV tuner in PC
is much more sensitive on the intereference than the normaln in TV. I played a little bid with
the cable plugs and bocame a noticable better picture but not as good as on TV. The TV signal
is limited to the quality that can the TV reproduce but the PC and it's monitor is capable
of much higher resulutions and picture quality.

I disagree.this is not normal.it happens when you don't spend the time or resources to set it up properly.

jamie2833 is right you need a booster or in some cases a filter to fix a signal problem.i have run many different tv cards and have never had a problem with lines or snow etc...and the picture was always at least as good as tv if not better.
my last tv tuner was the tv wonder, and the radeon aiw wonder the aiw wonder 16mb all had good picture if set up correctly.spend the money to set it up right and it will work correctly(discounting a bad card of course).

i had digital satalite on my radeon and cable at one time and somewhere in the middle i had it hooked up to an amplified antenna and i use just a amplifier now 50-900mhz 4 way to get the job done it cost 11.00,and no its not as good as a proper antenna lol

you will find the upgrade most pleasant when you get this worked out.

hope this helped
mike

 

[xpeter]

Wolfsraider >>

YES, I am giving you a credit for the explanation but I maybe poorly described what I meant.
I think that the PC tuner is maybe more sensitive and needs TV signal of much higher quality
because the interference than make the bad quality of the picture. I personaly has my cable
connected from multisplit and one cable goes to TV and the other to my PC TV tuner. If
I directly plug only the cable that goes to my PC than the picture is just perfect, if there are
both TV & PC plugged trhough the split than there is a higher interference on my PC TV tuner
but it does not affect the TV.

Anyway I think that you should also keep in mind the overall quality of the TV signal and the fact
that watching TV on CRT's or LCD's would reveal the quality of the signal much more because
you are watching the PC monitor from the distance of maybe 50 cm to 1 m and the monitor is
much more precise and has a much better picture quality than a common TV. Than keep in
mind the dot pitch of a TV and a monitor and you realise that you can't compare this two
things. Try watching the TV from the distance of 50 cm or less I think you won't see anything ;-).

And that's the main thing I wanted to say - maybe the PC TV tuners are as good as the common
TV but PC has a better visual processing so you will see every downgrade in the quality of
the TV signal.

 

[rbV5]

Actually the IQ from my AIW's tuner is superior to my TV, and is nearly identical to my TV via TV-out where I can compare them directly by switching the inputs with my remote.

When viewed from an appropriate viewing distance, it should look very good on your monitor....if not you have a problem. The 8500dv uses a different tuner from any other AIW card, and is sensitive to power supply problems and source signal strength, but the IQ is still very good, like all the AIW cards.

The reason it looks better in a 640X480 window is the same reason the picture on a 20" Wega looks better than the one on a 40" Wega.....its called scale, all things being the same, the smaller picture always looks better because it will still be using the same pixels to produce the picture.

 

[xpeter]

that's exactly it! viewing the TV on a PC from a normal ditance of more than 1.5 m seems as good as normal TV

 

[icjogger]

I have an antenna feed into my AIW 128 Pro and the picture is always very good.....usually better than the TV, but I attribute that two the actual viewing screen on my monitor is usually smaller than my TV, and it seems that a smaller viewing area usually results in a sharper picture. I run the antenna line into a booster, which I then cable separately into my AIW card and TV. I do a lot or TV recording.

 

[Flashram]

The tuner on the 8500DV is excellent. I've owned 3 or 4 other tuners and the 8500DV by far has the best reception.

 

[mykeowl]

I just installed a AIW raedon8500dv and the picture quality is as good as my TV.
However, can anyone help with this problem. With the AIW raedon installed, all the features work perfectly but internet explorer will not work. Cannot load a single page. If I put my old AIW 128 back in, IE works fine.