well, it has an excellent 1080i resolution when paired with compatible A/V equipment (i.e. a DVD player, STB, and so on). tv's arent really designed to display computer resolutions, and computers arent really designed to display on tv's (even with a tv out port on the video card). because tv's have much different timings than standard monitors it is necessary to use things like powerstrip to have the computer output timings that the tv can understand (the best example i can give you is that when your tv is hooked up to a regular tv signal (not from a computer) there is black space around that signal that the tv automatically trims off (called overscan). a computer does not send out this overscan, and that is why the resolution is so screwed up.

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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

I'd like to see more feedback on this.

Also someone mentioned a batch file to run to load wintv2k, does wintv2k load your color and etc preferences each time you load it? I know that I have been trying to figure out how to get amcap to load on startup for a long time to load certain contrast brighness and etc levels each time.

The good news is I got powerstrip working.  The better news is I have downloaded the new nvidia forceware drives and it has a great new feature.  Instead of an underscan button it now has a slider bar.  This proves to be much easier then powerstrip.  I have been disappointed up to this point with the drivers.  They are finally gaining back my trust with options like this being built into the driver.

 

I will say that the bitrate does a good amount of sharpening for my environment because of the 1080i.  When I am in a lower resolution on the extender all settings look ok.  I have horrible single in my house so I need as much information as possible to get a good picture.

 

angel--

to your second point, perhaps the Hauppauge Tweak Tool is what you're looking for...

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AMD 3200+ Venice + Zalman CPNS-7700Cu, Chaintech VNF4 Ultra, 1GB Corsair ValueSelect, SilverStone LC10 + FrontView VFD Plug-in, XFX GF7600 Fanless HDMI, 2 x Hauppauge PVR-500MCE, Seagate SATA 250GB, Sony DDU-1615, MCE2K5, Nvidia PureVideo Decoder

All,

Have finally a sharp TV image since last week. Before I had a grainy picture on good cable signal and it was driving me mad.

My problem was the resolution on 16:9 TFT. I noticed that when you play TV in non maximized MCE that then the quality was good. Try first to play with the window size of MCE on your primary monitor (if you use dual view) and see if quality changes on different sizes.

So I played a little with the resolution on the TFT and it worked. TV quality is now near original and my struggle for better TV quality is over for now... Guys, i'd say, try this at home...

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Yours truly,

Simon

 

Interesting. My picture looks MUCH better in a window that is stretched to fill most of the screen than it does when I switch to real fullscreen. What do you meant mess with the resolution of the TFT? Any other ideas why this might be?

In the meantime I did a full reinstall of my Media Center, and again I did lose some time by finding the best TV settings, but I found them again:

Maximize the window and put the resolution to 720 x 576 (is 16:9) with a 50Hz refresh rate (PAL signal) and then stretch to the maximum size (NVidia5200FX card setting -> Screen positioning -> put screen size setting at largest). These settings gave me the best result till now... 

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Yours truly,

Simon

 

Whats TFT?

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Vista Home Prem : P4 @ 3.2GHz : 3GB DDR2 : HD2600 : Auzentech X-plosion : HVR1600 : DishNetwork : OTA HD : good ole 27"CRT : DMA2200

The more I think about it the more I relaize I have just been making excuses for MCE. The quality of recorded TV is SIGNIFICANTLY poorer than that watched directly from the cable box. Now I have this audio sync issue as well, I am making a LOT of sacrifices to use MCE. Is it really supposed to be this way?

Hey

MCE can only go as high as ~8mbit according to MS. Which explains why it changes itself back after a reboot. The sync issue is adressed in the MCE HD Update rollup at least it fixed my problems. If you want to improve picture quality i suggest you use a weekend for finetuning.

My rig uses the Pvr-150, Albatron fx5900xt 66.77, nvidia Decoder .67. Crt TV (from sony 720/576 @50hz)(Vpl-cs6 projector@800x600) I am satisfied with my picture on my tv and I am very picky. Projector is another story Damn i hate LCD!

Do note that the resolution is very important, otherwise scaling will be done by your Video card which sucks on my system anyway. Also leave nvidia decoders on the default setting, otherwise you will have stutter and a crapped up picture. The various deinterlacing schemes done on the fly by the decoder is useless in my mind. Should you use the Windvd .6 decoders do increase subpicture precision to 100% 

I noticed a vast improvement in picture quality using the Forceware 70+ but my system then becomes unstable, so i use the 66.77 driver. I guess nvidia is pursuing those teenagers which themselves does'nt pay their own electric bill, and therefore buys a SLI systems. All drivers above 66.77 seem to be optimized for SLI. I HATE SLI and the path of Nvidia. 180watts for video processing? Insane!

 Another thing is the Hauppauge driver, The newest 23073 driver seems to be very poor, as far as picture quality. I think the 23053 is far better, when tweaked correctly with the hauppauge tweak tool below are my settings

1 in motion blur

3 static temporal

Bitrate 7000-8500 Vbr

Sharpness 5

contrast 123

brightness -5

other setting left as default.

Do remember to REBOOT after using the tweaker. Anyways i hope this helps but my settings might not be good on your system. I've spent hours of trial and error getting my picture just right.

Regards Anders

I had the same problem, and after a lot of playing about  I installed ffdshow, the windows xp decoder utility and powerdvd 6 (using the xp decoder utility to set powerdvd as default) and then when mce is running ffdshow will show in the taskbar (by the clock), Right click on that then go upto the cyberlink video/sp decoder, click on that and enable hardware acceleration, this resolved a lot of issues that i had with ghosting when any text scrolled across the screen or watching football when panning across the pitch, I hope this helps you all, you can also use this to upmix the signal to 5.1

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>If it ain't broke then let's break it !

True

New here, but I thought I'd chip in.  I had similar PQ issues that drove me crazy against MCE 2005, cable box, Haup. 150MCE card, nVidia 6600GT and Hitachi 42" EDTV plasma.   At the end of the day, I changed the cable from the cable box (coax) to a regular yellow RCA type cable (with S-Video adapter on the other end, for the tuner card input on the PC).  MASSIVE difference!!  No more jumpy, bleeding, text, and major artifacts on busy colors and vertical lines.

As for the Desktop, I switched from Component cables to DVI - again, MASSIVE difference - much better.

Now, if someone could only tell me what settings to tweak to get the rewind buffer bigger than 30 minutes... (which is how I found this thread).  Anyone?  I tried a few things, but nothing worked - even after a reboot.  Almost seems like MS is not even using these values.  No changes seem to do anything - though I'm sure I must be wrong.

 

Howdy

You can increase the recording buffer lenght using MCE Customizer, which is a free download if you register. Alternately

Regards Anders

Howdy

You can increase the recording buffer lenght using MCE Customizer, which is a free download if you register.

Regards Anders