Okay, was just puzzled that you are looking for a "fix".

From what I can see, everything appears to be working as expected, thus there is no "problem" to fix with MCE 2005 itself, and thus no "fix" is required.  It just sounded like something specific with your configuration as opposed to some Microsoft bug that needs to be fixed.

I have not used MCE 2004, so can't comment on that, but in general it sounds like most people are saying image quality of MCE 2005 has improved over MCE 2004.

ok, just tried it. i changed to 60000000 and didnt notice any difference. did you restart your computer after you made the change? i closed and restarted mce, but didnt notice a change, may have to try restarting computer.

---

System Specs:
Athlon 64 X2 4800+
Giga-Byte GA-MA69GM-S2H
ATI IGP X1250
1 GB RAM
2xT550Tuners
1x80 GB (C: Drive)
1x200 GB (Recorded TV)
1x500 GB (Docs, Music, Video, Pics, DVDs)
Toshiba 40" 40RF350U

Tried this reg adjustment with a PowerColor Theater 550 Pro and the image is noticeably sharper...same damn artifacts on high-motion & darkly lit scenes or in soft focus backgrounds, but a crisper image none the less.

Never looked at the CPU usage with this adjustment but have noticed that the transition between channels when surfing takes a little longer now.

Dave

Steve,

Tried it yesterday, but did not see any significant improvement. I still have the same grainy picture...   Furthermore I'm using a rather long s-video cable, maybe this is a problem. Going to try is soon with shorter cable or DVI cable... I will keep you informed. I will continue in my quest for better TV quality.

---

Yours truly,

Simon

 

ok, im gonna have to say that my initial response was preliminary only. i must have been really tired when i watched it after making the changes last night, but the screen is definately much sharper. still a little bit of grainyness in the darker areas, but it is a lot harder to see now. and the motion is smoother and i think it even helped the color balance, my images are a lot less washed out.

i did notice that the live tv takes a sec or two longer to load, which to me would mean higher cpu usage (although i didnt confirm this), but i am running on a 1600+ Athlon XP, so everything seems a little slow to me when it comes to live tv.

good find steve, greatly appreciate it!

---

System Specs:
Athlon 64 X2 4800+
Giga-Byte GA-MA69GM-S2H
ATI IGP X1250
1 GB RAM
2xT550Tuners
1x80 GB (C: Drive)
1x200 GB (Recorded TV)
1x500 GB (Docs, Music, Video, Pics, DVDs)
Toshiba 40" 40RF350U

Gentlemen...

Glad to hear your results... like I said, I wound up backing the setting down to 40000000 after a bad crash -- my best advice would be to sit on one TV channel and watch... and see if the box/MCE remains stable over the course of several hours.

In the meantime, the question still remains -- what exactly *does* this setting and the others in that registry branch do?  For all we really know, the original setting of 20000000 may simply refer to the *2nd* configured bitrate setting in the *usual* place (i.e. 10000000 for Fair, 20000000 for Good, 30000000 for Better and 40000000 for Best) or something equally obtuse.

If Olcay or any of the "usual gang" of registry tweakers here at TGB would put on their deerstalker caps, get out their magnifying lenses and snoop around a bit, I'm sure we could answer this question.  While I must say that the improvement in quality was noticeable to me, I'm just as suspicious of "subjective" results as I ought to be -- I don't want to turn this into "The Green Button meets The Green Magic Marker" (and if you're old enough to remember the early days of the Compact Disc revolution, you're ok in my book <grin>!

Steve

If you have a hauppauge PVR then to get the best quality :
Stop Media Center TV services.
Start Win TV 2000
Go to Pref, Movies and chose 12MB/s
Close WinTV 2000

(Alternative create a .bat with the following, thanks Chris.Day)
@ECHO OFF
CLS
ECHO Closing Media Center Services...
net stop ehrecvr
net stop ehsched
CLS
ECHO Starting WinTV2000...
start /wait C:\Progra~1\WinTV\WinTV2K.EXE -cg
CLS
ECHO Restarting Media Center Services...
net start ehrecvr
net start ehsched

--
PS. You can also adjust colour, etc this way

Does this setting stick, or does it need to be redone after every reboot?

So are you saying that MCE takes some kind of default from the card?  I find that rather hard to believe... but I'll certainly give that one a shot -- as a wise man once said, "it couldn't hoit"...!

- Steve

Don't know if this post will help:

http://www.xpmce.com/forum/ftopic92938.html
----------------------

This overscan compensation was enabled on my set-up for some reason. In the
:"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media
Center\Settings\MCE.PerUserSettings" section of the registry, the
"optimizeFor" key was set to "ComputerMonitor" not "Television". This meant
that LiveTV was being zoomed in a small amount - but enough to cause quality
issues when de- and re-interlacing, as well as moving on-screen graphics
uncomfortably close to the edge of screen on sports and news channels.

(due to Stephen Sneal)

-----------------------

---

Gordon
VMC1:CM4, i855-GMEm-LFS, PeM 1.6, 2g 333, 200g+400g PATA, Rad9600, NovaT500(+PVR150MCE), s/c TB Riviera, VGA-SCRT+PStrp (3.4)

VMC2:Shuttle SD11G5(915GM), P M 740 1.73, 2g 533, 300+500gPATA, NvidGForceNX7300GT (256 ddr2), Terratec2400iDT (3.6)

That's interesting, Gordon, but not applicable in my case... and the problems are definitely related to MPEG bitrate for me.  Still, it's useful information to have... and not something I'd seen here at TGB (XPMCE.com has so much system downtime or other issues that I can never seem to get any research done there...)

Steve

First of all: I don't have Win TV 2000. I tried it once, but for some reason I can't remember I had to uninstall it. I am concerned that re-installing it may mess something else up. I want to have as little as possible on my machine.

Secondly: Even if I have Win TV 2000, the recording value must be stored somewhere. Somewhere where MCE can pick it up. So where would that be?

Thirdly: Even without Win TV 2000 this is an issue, so I guess we could pretty much assume that we can leave it out of the picture (no pun intended ). But for sake of argument, let's say that there would be an improvement, and there is a value picked up by MCE, then there must be a way to simulate that vale, e.g. change a registry entry, edit an .ini file, etc.

I am of the strong opinion that neither Live (or time shifted) TV, nor any recording can ever be better than the quality of the stream coming out of the hardware of the tuner card. So if there is any sofware mechanism to change the quality setting of the encoding, there must be a way of raising that value. However I suspect that the quality of the encoding is defined by the hardware, and all any decoding software could do would be to retain the level of quality or reduce it. Anyone like to challenge that??

---

/Angel

I have tried the Reg Hack. Since I am scaling to 1080i I have noticed the tv quality was horible on live TV.  This change made a huge difference for me.  I am doing 60000000 with no problem. I have seen a few glitches over the last few days but well worth it to me.  Now if I could only find a way to do underscan for my TV with a hack.

@jbasso: have you tried using powerstrip? there is a guide for it here: http://www.htpcnews.com/main.php?id=powerstrip_guide_1 - this may help.

---

System Specs:
Athlon 64 X2 4800+
Giga-Byte GA-MA69GM-S2H
ATI IGP X1250
1 GB RAM
2xT550Tuners
1x80 GB (C: Drive)
1x200 GB (Recorded TV)
1x500 GB (Docs, Music, Video, Pics, DVDs)
Toshiba 40" 40RF350U

You Know it never occured to me to go back to power strip for this.  I will give it a whirl.  Since I am using the nvidia 6800 card it allows me to tune the video paramerters but without some guidance on what the 50 or so settings in there mean I dare not touch them.  I am using the wega sony tv.  Funny that this is supose to be a fairly good tv yet at 1080i I get bowing on the corners  at the top of the screen and assume it is due to an insuficiant power supply.  I would hate to think this is the norm for a $1500 to $2000 tv.

 

Thanks again on the power strip tip.