If playing with the birates doesn't help, I would suggest going through the troubleshooting datobin1 outlined - splitter, do both tuners give the same result, etc.

One last thing - As drivers for these cards are always changing, an upgrade to R5F27 may give you better results. See tjc's Hints writeup for known issues.

Ok, I will upgrade this weekend. After this I will tune and test a bit and let you know the results.

You will hear from me within a few days.

Thanks,
Victor

Ok, here is an update:
- I upgraded to R5F27. This didn't helped. It even get a little bit worse
- I add a splitter between the cable input and my tv. Tv still gives better result then the Knoppmyth box
- I bought an antenna amplifier with gain control. This didn't helped eather, but I think the antenna amplifier I bought is not working correctly. Also my tv give bad signal after connecting the amplifier.

I am really lost now. Is it maybe just easier to buy a better quality TV-card? And which one is the best for KnoppMyth? I just want good quality and 2 tuners.

Any suggestion, tips or remarks are more then welcome.

I think someone else has already pointed out to you that if you're looking for dual tuner solutions the PVR-500 is the one. Repeatedly asking the same question because you don't like the answer isn't going to change it.

You've also failed to provide enough info on your recording settings (recording profile) for us to tell if you've done something silly there.

There are a number of other things to look at:

- If you burn a recording to a DVD (with no re-encoding) and play that with a known good DVD player you can isolate capture quality from playback quality. When I did this a few years back it turned out that my video card and settings were 95% of the problem.

- If you're playback to an output resolution that requires scaling you WILL suffer a quality degradation. This is why the image quality pages on the wiki recommend a 480i or 480p (or PAL equivalent) so strongly. For higher resolution displays integer multiples (960 and so on) with appropriate smoothing will cause the least problem, but if you think that 800x600 or 1024x768 is better because it's "more" you're sadly mistaken.

- As some else already pointed out, there are some PVR-500s that do have issues, either due to bad hardware or a QC problem with the card, in which case your best bet is to contact Hauppauge about an RMA.

- If the requirement for a dual tuner card comes from slot restrictions in your computer, you may want to look at external capture devices that connect via USB or the network, however, these are generally single tuner.

The reason I reasked this question was because I didn't see a solution. But if you guys still believe in the solution, then I also do. I will keep continue with the testing.

You are right, I have forgotten to supply information about the recording profile. Well here it is:
MPEG-2 encoder:
page 1:
Profile name: default (but the configuration is the same for all the profiles)
auto-transcode after recording is enabled

Page 2:
W: 720
H: 480

Page 3:
codec:MPEG-2 Hardware Encoder
Stream type: MPEG-2 PS
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Bitrate: 10000
Max Bitrate: 11500

Page 4:
codec:MPEG-2 Hardware Encoder
Sampling rate: 32000
Type: Layer II
Bitrate: 384 kbps
Volume: 90%

I have no blank DVD at this moment, will try the test you described as soon as possible.

You wrote: "
If you're playback to an output resolution that requires scaling you WILL suffer a quality degradation. This is why the image quality pages on the wiki recommend a 480i or 480p (or PAL equivalent) so strongly. For higher resolution displays integer multiples (960 and so on) with appropriate smoothing will cause the least problem, but if you think that 800x600 or 1024x768 is better because it's "more" you're sadly mistaken."
I do not get this. What kind of resolution do I have to enter and where? Are you referring to the WxH resolution in the recording profile?

I do not mind to contact Hauppauge if my card seems to be bad, but at least I should try all the tests. So as soon you guys think the time is right to call Hauppauge, I will

Hope this information helps, again many thanks for your help. Because of this active forum KnoppMyth is succesfull.

I suggest burning a recording to dvd and view with a dvd player. You may have PERFECT recordings and playback issues. if so, the pvr500 is not the issue

_________________
R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

You might find those are _too_ high. An average bit rate of 6000 with a max of 8000 is usually plenty, and 8000/10000 if you want to go nuts. Setting the bit rate too high can cause buffer overflow problems. Oh, and turn off that auto-transcode, that may very well be the source of your problems.


You want to capture at native resolution (recording profile 720x480 for NTSC) and play back to a video output (your TV screen) which requires minimal scaling. A screen resolution of 640x480 is fine (I'm going to skip explaining the overscan issues here), next best (for a HDTV) is something like 1280x960.

If you're outputting to a SDTV using S-Video or Composite (yellow RCA phono jack) make sure the resolution isn't set to 800x600 as the 4->5/16->25 scaling involved can make your picture look like crap. Other resolutions may be even worse.

If you're outputting to a HDTV, depending on the resolution used, the scaling can make things look very ugly. This is why DVD player reviews make (or made) such a big fuss about the "up-sampling" performance. Even the highest quality 720x480 content can look like crap if the scaling is bad.

Hi,
I disabled the transcode option and this increased the quality a bit. Still some noice during liveTV, but it was a good tip. Thanks tjc!

I will burn a dvd tomorrow, when I am able to go to the shop for empty dvd's.

I try to figure out the resolution after tjc mentioned this could be the issue. Searching this forum I figure out to use the nvidia configure tool for this and the xorg.conf file. The nvidia is a great tool, but could not find any information related to the resolution. And the xorg.conf file.... where does it specify the resolution? I have multiple resolution mentioned in this file, I really don't understand where the selection is made for the resolution to be used.
For information, I'm using S-Video to connect to a normal tv (not lcd).

Memory says I've done at least a couple "what's what in a xorg.conf file" write ups that describe how things are linked together. Search for posts by me that mention (all of) "Section", "Monitor", and "Screen", say for example this rather short one: http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=17115&highlight=section+monitor+screen

There should also be a more detailed one but it may be older.