I've been trying to get my picture as clear as I can before turning mythv over to the wife and kids. I have been using live tv to make my settings because I can switch the tv back and forth between video straight from the cable and video from my mythtv box for comparison. I could never get video that I was happy with.

I am however happy with my DVD playback. It looks just as good as if it were played from a DVD player.

After much troubleshooting, I have determined that xine and mplayer will play my live tv recordings much clearer than mythtvs built in player. Please report back to me if you have or have not noticed this. This is not a minor difference, it is very noticable to me.

I asked in another thread if I could configure mythtv to use xine or mplayer for live tv or recording playback and got no responses indicating that I could. I have also done much reading and have determined that it is unlikely to ever be able to be possible, at least as long as you expect remote front ends to work without an NFS mount.

So my question is, does anyone else notice this? Does anyone else notice this? I can only see it on my 36 inch tv. It is mostly unnoticable on a 19 inch LCD. Is there a way to configure mythtvs internal player to use an external video decoder? I suspect the problem may be in the decoder.

Ideas? Comments?

_________________
KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200

Have you set BOB deinterlacing in MythTV playback?

Have you tried some of the filters in MythTV playback, in particular, denoise3d?

I have bob set for deinterlacing. I have not tried, using any filters. I can try that when I get home.

Can you comment on the quality of your live tv playback. Is it almost indistiguishable from the original signal, or is it obviously different to the casual observer?

If I can't get my live tv video to be very good quality, it is going to be hard to sell, slow channel changes, and fan noise to the wife.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200

I think my live TV quality is better than the same image displayed via my HDTV's analog tuner, primarily due to the denoise3d filter.

I haven't tried playing clips through xine to compare the difference.

The solution, btw, to slow channel changing, is to have it only change channels when you press Enter (I forget the setting you set to enable this). In other words, using channel up or down brings up the overlay channel guide, which you can browse through very quickly. Once you find something with a good description, you can press Enter and change channels.

I have that set too. I also like the guide with TV in the upper left. I have configured the select button to change channels instead of record, unless the show is more than 15 minutes out.

I love most of the features of myth. I just have to have a good picture. Once that is done, I can work around anything.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200

All I can suggest is a better description of the problems with your recordings. Or maybe a screenshot. I know xine can do screenshots; not sure how one would do a screenshot of LiveTV (and can't say I've searched). If you could post both screenshots and point out the differences, that might help. "Clear" and "fuzzy" could be any number of things (MPEG2 compression noise, original analog signal noise, lack of interlacing or lack of deinterlacing, too low a bitrate, too low a capture resolution, etc.)

You can see a history of me trying to work through this here. http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=49838&highlight=#49838

The short story is tjc greatyly helped me to understand x settings and gave me some good pointers for getting better video. Now it is the best it has looked, but I know it can look better becuase I have seen it when playing through mplayer or xine.

The best way I know how to describe it, is it looks like things looked before I had lasic done. If you squint your eyes and everything becomes out of focus, that is what it looks like.

I've played with the nvida-settings for hours. My settings are basicly defaults with flicker filter in the 60s and sharpening set at 1 or 2. Overscan is increased to 23 also. All 3 SyncToVBlank settings are checked.

Maybe I'm on the wrong track. Do mplayer, xine and mythtv player all depend on X settings? If not, I could be back tweaking X some more.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200