How Crisp Should the Video be for a TV Card ?

[jdeeze]

Another noob question, but here goes. I have had my Hauppauge 150 for almost 2 months and I have no complaints. Howveer I wanted to know how good a picture quality should you get. I have digital cable and on the tv it is flawlessly crisp[. On the Tv card it is good, but not the same as directly running into the tv. Is this the standard or are their tweks that should allow me to get live and recorded video at almost perfect quality ?

[sub]

With analog cards like the PVR150, its never going to be as good as the original transmission. MPEG2 encoding is a lossy compression, which will always loose some of the detail of the picture.

If you're recording from the output of your digital cable box, you will most likely have lost more quality than someone recording analog cable transmission directly from the cable, since its going through more analog/digital/analog conversions.

Most people loose the most picture quality displaying the captured video back to the TV through their software decoders and video card. This is sometimes only obvious to users that have used devices like the PVR350/XCard that can reproduce a beautiful video image on a TV. Using a regular video card with TV out often pales in comparison.