I decided to get a hardware based encoder and picked up a PVR-150. For some reason, video just does not look good. It looks washed out and grainy especially on channels with animations like the weather channel. In the small preview windows, the video looks much better, obviously. I tried to increase the resolution to 720x480 as well as the bitrate but it made no difference. I'm wondering if it has to do with the resolution that's being output to my TV. I have a 32" Olevia 232V Widescreen LCD. I have the myth box connected to the TV via VGA. When connected, the output registers 1024x768 @75Hz. I tried editing xorg.conf to reduce the output to 800x600 but it made no difference. I've looked around much of the posts here, the wikis, etc but can't seem to find anything conclusive. I think the screen can support up to 1360x768 through VGA but I have not tried to increase the resolution.

SD analog cable connected directly to the PVR-150. Checked cables, splitters, etc. Picture looks fine when plugged directly into TV. I would think my setup should be good enough to get me decent looking video. Or is the issue that I'm using a 32" widescreen LCD and the aspect ratio and scaling is screwing everything up?

Here's my setup details

1.6Ghz P4 No HT
1GB DDR Ram
60GB 7200 IDE HD
Radeon 7000 (VE) 32MB using VGA (edited xorg.conf to use 'radeon' driver)
Intel AC 97 Onboard Audio
PVR-150
R5E50 clean install

I'd really like to get this up and running. I've got this far with the help of the forums and docs.

TIA

The only thing I can think of off the bat is to check to see if the TV has any NTSC enhancement mode...

I remember my friend's Sony WEGA (55" or something) did the same kind of "enhancements" that would do stupid things like reducing the color palette...

Some video looked worse... some better...

It could be a place to start...

-Ben

Play a DVD and see if that looks good. That should determine whether it is to do with your computer->tv connection or just crappy recording quality of your tuner card.

I'm not viewing on a HiDef TV, but I managed to improve the quality of my PVR-150 using v4l2-ctl. I posted about it here...

http://www.mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13257

Read on down in the discussion, as tjc posted a more proper way to set the values so they stay after a reboot.

You may find that this link works better: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13257 Including the www. seems to break things...