I installed R5D1 with the following configuration:

- Asus K8V 64-bit motherboard
- PVR-250
- Nvidia 5200 with S-Video out
- Dish Network 301 receiver
- S-video from Dish to PVR-250
- S-video from Nvidia to TV
- Composite video out from Dish to second input on TV

Overall everything works great without a lot of manual configuration (unlike some previous releases of Knoppmyth/MythTV, which is great!!

However, I'm running into some issues that I just don't seem to find answers for. Have tried a bunch of things I've found in posts. Issues are:

- my video quality through MythTV is not as good as what I'm getting straight out of the Dish receiver. It just doesn't seem to be very sharp (crisp). Plus, I can't get the saturation and brightness levels to match up either using ivtvctl utility.

- There is a blue line on the left side of the screen. There was one on the top as well, but I was able to get rid of that using the vertical over/underscan percentage setting (I set it to 7).

Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

-b0b_cat2000

for the blue line issue:
http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=BlueBorders

Thanks Greg. I had actually seen that post and tried the setting, but it doesn't do anything on my system for some reason.

Also, I think the quality (or lack of rather) is due to playback. I recorded a show and transferred the .mpg file to my laptop and the quality is excellent. The main issues when playing on the TV are:

- distortion... the picture looks compressed vertically (faces look longer, etc.). I have played with the % settings but can't seem to get it right.
- more importantly, its the colors and the lack of crispness that is making a huge difference in quality between direct from receiver to TV vs. going through MythTV. The picture is not at all sharp when I play it on the TV.

Any ideas would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

Wanted to add a couple of things:

- quality from both xine and mplayer is the same

- live tv seems to show more picture compared to raw output from receiver to TV. For example, when watching news, there is a logo on the bottom right corner which touches the bottom of the screen in raw more. Coming out of MythTV, I can ee an inch or more of the picture below the logo! This is distorting the overall picture. I compared the picture on a couple of other TVs (from 2 other receivers) and I am not seeing the logo on those either. Don't know where these extra pixels are coming from through MythTV!

A better question is what is your TV doing with them. The effect is called "overscan" and it's how TVs keep the ragged edges of the picture from showing. It sounds like your TV is rather extreme in this regard.

Are you using bob deinterlacing? Do you have your display resolution set such that the number of vertical lines equals the number for your tv standard (480 for ntsc, 576 for pal)? Have you got the flicker filter turned as low as you can stand in the menus? These are all things that can improve the video quality a lot.

What Greg said. More here. http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=PictureQualityIssues

Hey Greg, could you add any other nvidia-settings tuning hints you can think of to the wiki page? Thanks...

Greg and tjc,

Thanks again. I've reviewed the info in the link and played with some of the settings. Haven't tried different drivers yet. I've also played with bobdeint, flicker filter, etc but nothing seems to address the issues. My current playback settings:

Deinterlace - checked
Algo - Bob
Custom Filters - none
MPEG2 Decoder - standard
Enable realtime and extra audio buffer - checked
aspect override - off
overscan - all 0

Recording profile:

width - 640, height - 480
stream type - mpeg-2 ts
aspect ratio: 4:3
bitrate: 4500
max bitrate: 6000


Couple of related questions:

1. In LiveTV mode and when watching a recorded program, what does MythTV use internally to play the video?

2. When I tweak some settings with ivtvctl, they go away after the next reboot. What file are these values stored in?

-b0b_cat2000

There are no other released drivers for R5D1. The 2.6.17 kernel means you need to use the 0.7.0 drivers. Also have you tried to isolate the problems to the recording end or the playback end? If other sources (like DVDs) don't look good it's probably playback.

Added a blurb on flicker filter.

I'm trying to figure out whether the issue is recording or playback. Just played a video clip from a dvd and it seems to be ok, but i need to do more testing. If the issue is due to capturing, do you have any suggestions?

The issue is definitely related to playback, not capture. The picture coming out of MythTV is not even close to being as sharp as what's coming out raw from receiver. I'm a bit lost at this point

See the wiki page. I had quality problems with the MX4 (Nforce2 IGP) based video I had in the old machine, tuning with nvidia-settings made a huge difference.

I happened to have an Nvidia 6200 card and just replaced the 5200 with it to see what happened. Well, my blue lines went away and the picture quality is great! Not sure why the 5200 wasn't working as good but I'll try to figure it out when I get some time. I did try nvidia-settings and didn't get anywhere with it.

My recollection is that the key adjustments were the gamma settings and the anti-flicker stuff Greg noted. I also turned the sharpening down to zero.

However some cards are just better than others at TV-output. At best the MX-4 was tolerable. The FX5200 looks far, far better.