Recordings better than Live TV?

[nemulate]

Should I expect my recording to look better than when viewing Live TV? Might just be me but they seem to look better, first time I've done some serious recording.

[MicroSark]

I also thought that 'in general' recordings seemed to look better than live TV, but I recently changed the 'Live TV' recording profile in the recording source settings so that Live TV is 9500 kbits/sec constant (not variable). Live TV is now as smooth as silk and looks almost as good as my home TV - I know it will never be as good as due to it being an mpeg stream, but it's certainly good enough.

Obviously you need sufficient processing power to handle the bitrate (I have a 3 gig P4 using HT) or a hardware decoder (which I haven't got).

[djtaylor]

I think that one of the effects that may be noticed here is a softening of the picture during the recordings so that speckes etc don't get noticed as much. That's just a guess but i've seen that before when digitising VHS tapes.

David.

[capone]

Try lowering the Live TV settings to the same as Medium which you use for recording to see if they look the same.

Another possibility would be if somehow you were using a different decoder for viewing a recording than you were for Live.

[nitrogen_widget]

I have noticed when recording off my directv box that the RCA outputs produce a better picture than the coax output even though the video winds up going to the tv's coax input.

Which makes sence to me.