Terrible picture quality --- going insane!

[skye3000]

I have been working with GBPVR for the last week and have learned quite a bit from this site about PVR's in general. I am running a rather slow system however I have an MSI theater 550pro tuner card and a sapphire radeon 7000 pci vid card. the computer is a PIII 533mhz.

My problem is with liveTV performance. It is Crap. everything is very pixelated despite the quality setting in GBPVR config application. I have read just about every thing that pertains to this topic on the forums and throughout wiki. I would like to pin point my problem and if anyone has any information about why I'm getting such bad performance from the MSI theater pro550 please respond here.

If you are looking for a tuner card, do not buy MSI theater pro550. no Linux support and the remote is about junk. Very limited functionality with windows as there is no configuration app.

thats all for now.

[sub]

Your CPU is probably a major contributor to your problem. The recommended minimum spec is a PIII 1Ghz - your CPU is about half that.

[daphatty]

Your Video Card isn't much better than your CPU either. I used to use a 7000 series ATI card and it just couldn't handle the load. I saw tons of tearing and the picture quality was horrible. I'd say you need an all around upgrade.

[skye3000]

I see what you are saying. this morning I installed my tuner card in my good pc. specs are as follows:

AMD Athlon XP 2600
MSI Geforce FX 5600
MSI Motherboard w/nForce 2 Chipset.
200GB Maxtor HDD ATA 133
512 MB RAM

I used the Intervideo decoder with VMR 7 and the picture quality was just about perfect. If I were to build another machine what should I look for in a video card? should it be directX 9 comaptable? Does the core clock speed make a difference? who makes the better chipset for video nvidia or ATI?

Thanks for the help. I really don't want to chalk my work up to a loss since GBPVR is exactly what I want and is a great piece of software.

[sub]

I think if you do a forum search, there has been several users recommending specific video cards in the past.

[capone]

I have the 5600 on my system. Works fine.

[daphatty]

You can't go wrong with a GeForce card. I'd say no lower than what you are using in the new system. (I have a 6200 myself.) In fact, I'd say your current system is a great start.

The thing to keep in mind is that once you start on this journey, you WILL get hooked on it. Having complete control over your HTPC becomes an addiction so you need to make sure that your platform will sustain any upgrades (a.k.a. more power!) that you will most certainly seek out. One of the issues I keep running into is the fact that I have a Small Form Factor mATX case (a Compaq). I can use full sized PCI cards but my AGP video card MUST be low profile card. To make matters worse, it has to be AGP 4x as that is all the unit will support. Needless to say, my choices are limited in that arena.

Bottom line, now that you have the capture card, it's time to really evaluate your needs and chose a build path. The system you started out with is, IMO, on worth using as a file server. You need something beefier for the capturing and playback duties.

[excotec]

I would have to agree with the above. CPU just does not have enough power. Can not stress enough how aditive this will become. It will not help if you are married and the wife enjoys it also. I have been wanting to tweak my system all night but can't because the wife is watching everything she missed this weekend. If she sees me working on it she gets upset because she has already scheduled something to record. If you do upgrade get something that has plenty of power and expansion slots. Before long you will be adding a second capture card so you can record more than one show at a time.

[capone]

AMD Athlon XP 2600
MSI Geforce FX 5600
MSI Motherboard w/nForce 2 Chipset.
200GB Maxtor HDD ATA 133
512 MB RAM

This config should be fine. It's about what I have. You can't go nuts w/ the post processors, like deinterlacing, etc (you can do some, but there will be a limit), but it's a good performer.

[skye3000]

So I'm looking in to getting some new hardware since I can't use my main PC (Its also plays the role of file, print and FTP server). The hardware I'm looking at is as follows:

AMD athlon Sempron 2500+ 800mhz FSB
MSI Motherboard with nforce 3 chipset
512 MB RAM
MSI NX6200AX-TD128LF Geforce 6200 128MB 64-bit DDR AGP 4X/8X

This video card is still pretty cheap but it is a lot faster and has a newer chipset than my radeon 7000. If anyone can give me some direction here on choosing my video card I would appreciate it. Thanks.