My first PVR - up and running!

[Atomike]

And the picture quality is a little disappointing. My live tv has that computer look - you know, like it's missing a frame here and there, but it's not jerky. It's like someone did a 3:2 pulldown, and then back to it.
But that's ok - cause the recorded shows is what I care about.
I taped a "Family Guy", and the first 2/3 were awful. Weird distortion when anyone moved, or a quick pan. The last 1/3 was great quality - don't know why. That gave me hope.
What settings do I need to look at/change from default?

XP Home
FX5200 output (I forget which driver - it was recommended on some site)
PVR-250 input (newest driver)
3000+ processor
GB-PVR
Cable TV coming in.
In USA

[sub]

Weird distortion when anyone moved, or a quick pan.

Sounds like you may be describing interlacing artifacts. Try setting the deinterlacing setting on the misc tab to something other than 'None'.

[Atomike]

Yes, I did that. Here's the thing - my video quality is much better in the BeyondTV trial. So, I imagine it's possible to get similar results with GB-PVR, but I just can't for the life of me, figure out how. This is an odd thing to say, but there are really too many settings in GB-PVR.

[sub]

GB-PVR doesnt do the playback for video itself, but instead relies on third party components you already have installed on your machine. Assuming you configure it to use the same MPEG2 decoder BeyondTV, and same bitrate, then the results will be identical.

[wfooshee]

Here's a thought. What quality recording setting are you using? Also, you can shut down GBPVR, start up BeyondTV, play the video and compare. Is it the same in BeyondTV or better? That'll tell you if it's a recording or playback problem, and you can proceed from there.

BTW, I'm a former BeyondTV user myself. If I didn't have the MediaMPV, I'd probably still be running it, but the MVP project for BeyondTV is in its infancy, and GBPVR blows it away there.

[Atomike]

Good ideas. I'll try them out tomorrow to see if I can nail down the problem. I'm using the "medium" settings - however I changed the bitrate to variable 6500 to 8000. I would much rather use GB-PVR than BTV - and so I'm dying to get identical results. I was hoping it was a decoder issue - but the Nvidia DVD decoder still exhibits the same look as without as best I can tell. So much to learn.

[sub]

If you configure it to use the same MPEG2 decoder as BeyondTV, and same bitrate, then the results will be identical.