Alrighty- here's a new one as far as I can tell. I'm running a 848x480 projector (infocus 4805), I've got a custom modeline to do that, and it works pretty good. If I tune HD, it looks about as good as it possibly can. The problem is, if I tune in SD from my dish with the PVR-150 (svideo), it looks pixelated. Not really bad, but entirely noticeable if, say, there's white text on a dark background- the letters aren't *quite* the right shape- smooth curve transitions at that color difference aren't so good.

I've already set the recording profile to 720x480, HD looks great, and the dish svideo looks good when piped directly to the projector.

Any ideas? Meanwhile I'll try to grab it in a screenshot.

Are you using (or is it falling back to) one-field deinterlacing?

Yeah! That halves the vertical resolution doesn't it? So obviously it WOULD look fine in HD and bad in SD. Let me turn that off and see what I get. Can't tell you how long I've been irritated at this.

Thank you very much for the pointer.

Yep- that was it. Looks much better now.