HP Digital ExpressCard image quality

[iceykitsune]

this is the first time i have posted here but i have searched the forums a lot.

I have an HP digital ExpressCard Tv tuner that has hardware mpeg2 encoding. I have both Digital and Analog channels working but the analog side is really really fuzzy looking. I tried different settings on the playback tab but nothing really changed. I tried fooling around with the ffdshow settings to see if i could make the quality any better through that but it still barely works. I noticed somewhere on the forums that you had to use "encoder passthrough" for similar cards but when i do that the card does not activate for analog channels.

what i am looking for is any help to get the quality of the analog tuner higher. the digital channels are fine except the local standard def channels that are sent via OTA ATSC, which are just as bad as the cable NTSC channels. the digital side comes up as an Hauppauge OEM 885 and the analog comes up as an HVR-1800MCE. I am running vista buisness on a laptop with GF 7600 Go, 2 GB ram, 2 GHz core 2 duo.

Description of image:
scanlines visible, deinterlacing helps but unable to get enough from ffdshow
fuzzy image with slight occasional lag
slight shadowing.

i have tried to enable the EVR video rendering but it tends to cause my to loose analog. i have also tried changing out the quartz.dll. i am running version 1.1.5.

any help would be appreciated.

IK

[sub]

Does it really have a hardware MPEG2 encoder? ie, can you record with it? From the logs it doesnt look like it.

[iceykitsune]

i havent tried to record with it as i didnt want to waste the time if the quality was going to suck. i dont remember where i heard that it did have hardware encoding but with as hot as it gets im inclined to think its doing alot more then passing the signal through. also, on my main pc, using the software encoder plugin, i have a ATI TV wonder 200 pci running under GBPVR and the quality is not great but it is still abit better then the digital card. I will try to record something later tonight and post what i find out.

[iceykitsune]

ok i tried to record last night and it didnt record on analog. it said that it was recording but the card didnt activate and the files didnt grow. digital recorded fine.

[sub]

Yeah, I suspect this is only usable as a digital capture device. You were only lucky to get it kind of working with analog.

[iceykitsune]

yea, but the main thing is that im not really looking to get it recording, while that woudl be nice i just mainly want it to be a decent quality picture.

[sub]

Sorry I dont really have any tips on how to improve the quality of this card. I really dont know anything about this device.