Anybody know the answer to this???...

My card is a Pinnacle PCTV with a BT878 and a Phillips tuner and so far so good I have everything working. but..... The image quality on my tuner card is not what I expected, it looks all pixelated (just as a bad DIVX and a VCD Movie) I know is not my Video Card because Everything else looks perfect... Is this how it is supposed to look??? Am I expecting too much from theese tuner cards? can it ever look like the quality of a normal TV? If so how can I improve the tuner image quality???


I've been stuck on this for a months now, its frustrating. Cansomebody help me for the love of GOD!!!!

For what it's worth, a HD recording should look immaculate. It should be as good as watching live HD. If it isn't, something is wrong.
Make sure that you're using the HD capability. Set the card up as a DVB card, in the backend setup. Files should be about 8GB for an hour of 1080i (varies wildly), and they'll have an extension of .mpg

Thank a lot for your reply but my card is an old Pinnacle PCTV and it does not do HD, but thanks anyway for your help.

Anymore ideas anybody????

oops - sorry. I mis-read your post.

You need to check your Recording Profiles (Utilities/Setup->Setup->TV Settings->Recording Profiles->Software Encoders (v4l based)).
There should be 4 profiles (Default, Live TV, High Quality, Low Quality), but at the moment each of these are set to the same.
The 2 principle quality settings are the number of pixels you are capturing and what bitrate is your capture, increasing both of these are good for quality, but are bad for system diskspace usage and processor capacity. Diskspace usage can be reduced by using MPEG4 compression rather than RTjpeg, but again that increases processor usage.
You need tp be careful though, couple of nights ago I was trying out a box with a WinTV Theater card, and ended up with a 60Gb+ recording of a 2 Hour PAL programme.
Recommended NTSC capture resolutions are listed in the MythTV-HOWTO.

Bruce S.

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Thanks a lot for your help, I still do not have it the way I want it but at least it is not pixelated anymore, I changed the resolution from 480 x 480 to 720 by 480. I still need to find out how to adjust the Brightness and Contrast on this thing, but your answer helped me alot!!

I really appreciate it.

Does anyone have a card that actualy looks exactly like a TV? does anybody have a PCTV card that looks exactly like a TV???

Hi everybody... I was finally able to achieve pretty good image quality this is what I found out in the process, I wrote it down for me and would like to share it with everybody...

1) Do not use COAXIAL cable as an input to the tuner card, use either COMPOSITE (RCA) or S-Video, then run an RCE cable straight from your receiver (DirectTV, SKY, Dish Network, etc) to the audio input (the blur jack) on your computer’s sound card.

2) Connect to the TV using VGA (Somehow) not S-Video… NVIDIA’S S-Video output is total crap!!!

3) Go into the setup menu, I think under general but it could be under tv->playback, look for a setting called something like "use Xv controls" and make sure that the box is checked.

The F key will now let you control the display brightness, contrast, hue and saturation. The G key does somethng similar for the capture card. You can also get to these through the onscreen menus during playback (M key).

For top level control and things like overscan the nviidia-settings utlility is the way to go.