[Extratx]

I built an HTPC not to long ago using a Haupauge 1800 card. The HD capture is fine, but the SD leaves alot to be desired. I was hoping to replace my Series 1 Tivo but the PQ is so bad in SD that I have kept the Tivo and use it for all SD recording still.


Does anyone have a recommendation for a quality SD tuner card? I have a 2.5ghz quad core with 4gb ram so computer speed should not be an issue.


Thanks

 

[James_stewart]

Improvement in SD quality can be achieved through codecs and adjustments within a codec like FFdshow. This isn't a hardware issue. For example, my SD quality was crap in Vista, when I installed Windows 7 there was a significant improvement. This was all achieved through the way Win7 handles SD material.

 

[walford]

Extratx,

If you are upscaling NTSC SD 480i programing for output to a HD resolution display, especially a 1080p model, it will look very poor especioally at a close viewing distance since between 1/2 to 3/4 of the pixel content has to be invented. HDTVs are just not designed for SD progam content.

 

[Extratx]

I just have my HTPC outputting 1080P through HDMI to my display. My original Tivo connects via composite to the same display and has far better PQ than my tuner card through media center. I have also tried BeyondTV and SageTV.


I have FFDshow however have not tried tweaking it for quality. I am going to look for some how to's for FFDshow to see if I can improve the PQ. The tivo isn't perfect by any stretch, but it is twice as good as the HTPC currently.


Thanks for the pointers.

 

[walford]

I am not surprised that TIVO give you much better PQ.

Have you tried outputting 480i to your TV over HDMI just like your Tivo is doing over composite?

Even 1080i/60 would probably be better then 1080p/60 or 1080p/24 for SD content.

If you have your SD tuner on the 1600 compressing and encoding SD content with its cheap onboard encoder chip for MC then it;s PQ will be a lot less then direct inport of the SD content for use by another application.

 

[manicdan]

hey guys, its a bit off topic but quite similar


i have a pretty beefy pc and comcast basic digital cable, so only composite output. so i need a standard def tuner. and my tv is actually a bit monitor, the composite and svideo inputs look like crap, but it can support 800x600 using its vga input, which i plan to take advantage of


i use to use ati AIW cards and was quite happy with the results, but i never really tried to clean it up. im also quite familiar with ffdshow for watching hd content on my pc.


so im looking for a tuner that has the software that can let me clean up the picture. any cards recommended? btw im on win7 64bit

 

[walford]

The cable connection coming from your wall contains both analog and digital channels. It is the tuner that dertermines which you watch.

If you have asn HDTV card that can receive both OTA digial and clear QAM digital channels then you can get the clear QAM cable digital channels from your basic cable service.

 

[sneals2000]

Yep - the quality of the de-interlacing and scaling and post-processing used by the HTPC (and GPU drivers) is likely to make much more of a difference than the quality of the tuner card itself (which these days are just RF demodulators and NTSC/PAL/SECAM decoders, coupled to MPEG2 encoders - assuming a hardware compression card).


De-interlacing using a vector adaptive / temporal adaptive rather than just motion adaptive or Bob/Weave can be a major improvement, as can Lanczos or other improved scaling algorithms.


Many PC scaling systems treat the pixels as square blocks rather than gaussian samples and don't do SD content any favours.

 

[PanamaMike]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Extratx /forum/post/16837148


I built an HTPC not to long ago using a Haupauge 1800 card. The HD capture is fine, but the SD leaves alot to be desired. I was hoping to replace my Series 1 Tivo but the PQ is so bad in SD that I have kept the Tivo and use it for all SD recording still.


Does anyone have a recommendation for a quality SD tuner card? I have a 2.5ghz quad core with 4gb ram so computer speed should not be an issue.


Thanks

When you say SD I'm assuming an Digital SD signal. Also I'm assuming you're using OTA or Cable QAM?


There are a lot of factors that will come into play when you're comparing these two things. As far as I remember the Series 1 Tivo is strictly analog, I'm guessing you had an STB or other to feed it the SD signal. It will also depend on the TV you're outputting to. Is it the very same TV?


Another ugly secret about HTPC is the fact that black levels haven't been standardized. There are two competing standards 0-255 for RGB and 16-235 for HDTV. Depending on how software/hardware/drivers are implemented and configured on your HTPC, there's usually an issue with the black signal either being crushed or compressed. I find this greatly impacts IQ beyond the issue of scaling. Colors aren't as saturated, details are lost...


That may be another reason the picture isn't looking as good.