Video quality problem - artifacts?

[garetmax]

Hi,

I've just noticed that all of my recordings recently have a lower video quality. I haven't really made any big changes to my machine other than upgrading to 98.13 a couple weeks ago.

I'm not sure what this is as I haven't had it before. My quality has always been excellent. I record on medium quality using a PVR-150.

When I just watch TV on the TV it looks good so I don't think its my cable input feed. I'm wondering if this is a capture problem with my 150 card and not a playback problem either. The recordings do the exact same thing at the same moment when I play them back in either GB-PVR or Win Media Player. The playback settings in GB-PVR are just set as system defaults.

See the attached capture. Is this what is called artifacts? What could have caused this change? How do I fix this?


Thanks,
GaretMax

[Koenie]

Have you changed the recording quality (bitrate) in GBPVR before? When installing a new release GBPVR takes the database and config.xml with to the next release, not a numer of other files which contain amongst others the quality settings.

[garetmax]

I haven't changed the bitrates before that I know of.

I made some screen captures of what I've got.

What's interesting is that it looks like the Medium bitrate for Xrecord is 6000 but when I went into GB-PVR config for medium it shows 3500. Is this where my problem is?

I didn't really see any bitrate info in config.xml other than what was shown in there for Xrecord. Where else would I look?

Thanks,
GaretMax

[sub]

If you're using the same bitrate as before, then the quality will be the same.

Are you sure you havnt installed some software that has installed new video decoders, making playback look different?

[garetmax]

There were 2 programs that were installed within the last month by my wife so possibly something got changed.

1) Google Earth software which is: "satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips."

2) Stylewriter software which is an English spelling and grammar software.

Is it possible that either of those have adjusted settings? Where do I look to see if settings have been changed?

I guess I'm not sure on this as its been awhile since I've looked at these issues. Do you think this is a playback problem or a capture problem? Are the video decoders used for capture or playback or both? I'll have to do some researching to get more familar with this again.

Thanks

[Jim_]

The GBPVR recording settings you choose (using gbpvr config) are stored in “Direct.ini”.
I’m not sure what the xrecord settings in config.xml are for, I’ve never changed them and my xrecord-scheduled recordings match the settings I choose in the gbpvr config utility.

Could it have been a bad broadcast or a poor cable / satellite signal?
How does live TV look? It uses a higher bitrate by default.

Hope this helps.
Jim

<edit>
Keep in mind that I only view recordings using an MPV, so software decoder issues aren’t part of my thought process… :o

[sub]

I guess I'm not sure on this as its been awhile since I've looked at these issues. Do you think this is a playback problem or a capture problem?

If its using the same bitrate, then I'm guessing its a playback problem. All the encoding is done in hardware, so I cant really see much changing on that front.

[garetmax]

I think I might have it fixed. I've tested on a couple new recordings and they look real good now.

After some researching, I changed out the quartz.dll file from the 09c 6.5.2600.2180 version to the 09b 1.87MB version 6.5.1.902.

The old files that were recorded previously still have the problem, so I'm hoping that changing out the quartz file affects the capture and not just the playback. I guess I'm still unsure of this. I was expecting that changing out the quartz file would fix the playback problem of the existing recordings as well.

I think that switching to 98.13 and more specifically the .net2 and sql with the directx09c quartz file was the problem. I haven't really watched anything since the sql database switch and just noticed the problems today. Anyway, hopefully this was the case and its all fixed.

Here's another screen capture of what was happening to me. I really didn't see much studdering on playback previously, but just this weird random blockyness. It wasn't bad enough to not watch the shows, but it was definitely a problem and certainly not the excellent quality that I'm used to.