Poor Recording

[admiral ross]

Hello All!

I have a WinTV PVR-500 MCE. The channels come in with poor reception they aren't nice and sharp and clear. Is there a way to improve picture quality? Also, I don't like the MPEG2 recorder codec. The files are too big. I know that Divx or Xvid can make the files a lot smaller. How do I change the decoding format and improve picture quality?

Thanks,

[sub]

MPEG2 files are pretty large. These cards are only capable of recording directly to MPEG1 or MPEG2, but there are several options to have your system automatically convert the recordings to divx or xvid after the recording completes (or overnight if your prefer).

[Ranman]

I think you are SOL with the picture quality. I have just put an antenna on my roof tying to improve picture quality. Very little help. My city has it's towers on a 10500ft mountain so it was just a last resort thing. I have 8 TVs between my motorhome and my house. ALL have a better picture than my PVR-500 tuners. If anyone has any other ideas I'll try it/buy it what ever.

[sub]

What I'd suggest as a test, is burning one of the recordings to a DVD, then play it in a regular set top DVD player. This will give you an indication how much of your problem is caused by the recording made by the PVR500 and how much is playback issue. Lots of people have playback problems and wrongly assume its the recording, so worth a shot.

[River_Styx]

You can take a look at the Hauppauge tweaktool.
You can find it here among other places:
http://www.cask-of-amontillado.com/pvr_tweak.html

You can tweak the brightness, sharpness but also the MPEG MB/s capture rate for sound and picture. This way you can downgrade the MPEG stream so that your files will be smaller.

Dont forget to do this for both the Tuners onboard!

And ofcourse you could do the same from GBPVR --> gbpvr-config-capture sources/edit recording

[Ted the Penguin]

there has been a issue of late with hauppauge changing the chipsets in the PVR500s, they switched to a different chipset which apparently produces a lower quality image. just wanted to throw that out as a possible cause of the problem