TV resolutions are a lot lower than PC resolutions. If you watch OTA HD, you'll get 720. Regular TV is something like 320, I can't remember. So that's where the problem lies.

This is a bump, in hopes of someone giving details on improving the quality of Vista Media Center.

I am using an Xbox 360 as a Media Extender, and Vista Ultimate with 2 tuners in it. (ATI 650's).   My 360 is connected to my HDTV via HDMI, and the quality of my tv is garbage.

Someone please help.  I'm so frustrated.  I dont want to downgrade back to MCE2005 just to fix this.  Ive tried the registry fixes in previous posts, to no avail.

Really hope someone jumps in here, cause I'm going to continue to bump this till someone helps.

I wouldn't call moving back to MCE2005 a "downgrade" :P.

Teejay69:

"Here are some other Hauppauge WinTV settings that make a nice difference. The first thing you want to do is add the below "HcwSaveEncoderSettings" to your registry. This will allow the below settings to save after you restart your computer. After you add this to your registry restart your computer before making any further changes.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hcwPP2\DriverData]
"HcwSaveEncoderSettings"=dword:00000001"

 I have added this to the registry but it won't save the settings.

 I have also noticed after using Graphedit that there are two filters.

I created one using the instructions above but can't get the settings to save.

I also found one through the advanced tab on the Hauppauge tweaker tool but I can't get the settings to save on that either.

Sorry for bringing this up,

I've been messing with all the suggestions in regard of the PVR-250/350 and I think the Hauppauge tweaker work under Vista but leave the impression it doesn't.

I installed the nVidia Pure Decoder, and once installed I fired the VMC and you could notice the nVidia PV poping out in the Windows icons task bar.  I click on it, and you can see the bit rate progress bar showing live how many bit rate the TV is encoding. By default it on 6 VBR so you can see the up and down of the nVidia bit-rate bar around 6 and 10. 

I closed the VMC, start the Hauppauge Tweaker and set the VBR to 12 with constant bitrate (So I can stop the up and down visual of the progression bar), SAVED (important) and I started VMC live TV.  And indeed, the progression bar was maxed, with no up and down.  At this point this told me that the Hauppauge Tweaker works.  The small portion of the file I recorded was bigger than usual and when I look into the rightclick>properties>details the Audio Bitrate was 12mbps (in reality I suppose it a bug and it not related to audio).

I felt the TV quality to be slighty better but still have compression artifacts, but when I changed channel I realized it was only the horrible quality of airing of the channel I was. 

The only problem with the Hauppauge Tweaker is it working only per session of Windows as far of my observations.  So once you do the tweaks, if you reboot Vista, it will have no effects, and the settings will be back to default.  So if you have to reboot, you have to redo these settings.

Hope this help.