I was just messing around with pvr stuff on my main pc (not something I'd use for set-top pvr) but am Not pleased with tv-out quality.

Capturing with a wintvGo composite
TV-out with nvidia 6800 s-video out

The image looks washed out when recorded; Routing the cable signal (comcast digital) through my comp and back out to the tv for recording looks like cabbage as well. Specifically the image has "thin" colors, washed out and a quality like an old vhs tape that is being broadcast.

Is this the hazard of diy capturing? What steps can I take to get as close to DVD sharp playback like I get from the cable box. The comcast box outputs the image at a great quality on the digital channels but capturing them crapifies the signal and I think the software is capping at 25fps instead of ntsc 27.9 (or 29.7 can't remember which) and its causing some weird looking motion, like "pre-lag" too fast to be really noticable but its there.


Recomend the best hardware for capturing and tv-out as I will be upgrading.

Thanks!

Both capture card settings and TV Output from video cards often need some tuning. The quality can end up quite good, some even say better than what they normally see.

With a PVR-250 I found very little need to fiddle with the capture settings, but the TV-Out settings really needed work.

A search for "image quality" or "capture quality" (check the "search for all terms" box for multui word searches!) should turn up a number of relevant threads. Also try over in the MythTV Users mailing list archives at: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/

This may help:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... ace+svideo