*Sigh* Which TV Tuner has best image quality?

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Originally posted by: jones377
I have the PVR-150 and I think the image quality is pretty good. It's better than the ASUS card I had before.

But I can't watch sports with them. Ice Hockey or Football, all looks blurry and crappy. Anyone else have this problem with these cards? Movies work just fine but sports is crap. Is there any way to fix this?

You could try the Hauppauge Tweak Tool and fiddle with the various settings under the tabs for the "150". You can tweak brightness, contrast, hue, etc... Often if you have large fields of white color, such as ice on the rink, or playesr bright white uniforms, then the rest of the picture can become a bit blurry. Tweaking the color options can help a lot.

If the color options dont seem to help, then you may want to check the quality of your incoming signal. An amplifier/noise filter might be rquired if you have a weak signal.

If all else fails, you could try recording the video at high quality, and then playback using a filter like ffdshow to sharpen, or remove noise, or whatever you need done.

 

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Originally posted by: B00ne
I just bought a Hauuppauge winTV PVR-150 and found this thread when searching in something to improve picture quality.

Before (still) I had a simple WIntv PCI go ( no hardware mpeg encoder)

Well I am new to hardware encoder cards but I have to say if you want picture quality go with a cheap tuner card with no hardware encoding. My old wintv PCI has a far better picture quality (using dscaler3 as TV program - much better than the hauppauge software) than the PVR150 (Wintv2k or beyondTV)

Well actually i almost think the hardware encoding card have to have a worse picture quality, as there is no way to acces the raw TV data - just the mpeg stream and mpreg after all is a (lossy) compression.

Summary picture quality on hardware mpeg card is ok but looks very washed out when compared side by side with the result of a simple TV card with dscaler3

You need to play around with the recording bit rate settings. If you dont think the quality is good enough, increase the bit rate.

If your planning on keeping your video around, on your HD or on a CD/DVD, then I would suggest recording your video at a constant bit rate at 12000, and then re-encode to a lower bit rate using Windows Media Encoder, DivX or XviD. An hour long video encoded at 1 mb/sec with WME/XviD will take up roughly 300-400 mb with video quality almost identical to 12mb/sec mpeg2.