I would say that performance is good, but the tearing of the interlacing is just aweful. I really want to get rid of my tivo, but my wife won't let me because of this issue. It actually gives her headaches. I don't want to rain on anybody's parades, but if anyone had told me this before I bought my equipment, I would have waited before jumping in until a better card came along.

If it is bad enough to give you headaches then your deinterlace filters are not working properly and you should look into this. I promise you when it is working properly it is hardly noticeable.

I was working with someone on a system the other day, and he said he didn't notice a difference with deinterlace turned on or off and it ended up he had to uncheck the use xvmc hardware playback checkbox (whatever that is my setup doesn't even have it) and then the filter started working and he was like oh yeah thats better I can definitely tell now.

I went through a lot of interlace/deinterlace discussion over at Snapstream/BeyondTV, with regard to nVidia, etc.

Yes, the video out from the nVidia systems do not support "passing through" of an interlaced signal. It deinterlaces the signal destined for the video out, then (I'm assuming) re-interlaces the output so the TV will get the proper signal.

The Snapstream forums seemed to imply that (I think) Matrox cards were one of the few cards that properly passed through an interlaced signal to their TV out ports.

Theoretically, the hardware MPEG2 decoder and video-out capabilities of the PVR-350 should maintain the proper interlacing and field order and therefore look "right." However, Snapstream doesn't support the 350's video out. SageTV does.

MythTV of course supposedly does support 350 output, but I always read about the bugginess of the current release's 350 support, and am not enough of a Linux person to do things like build from CVS or stuff like that. Would like to try 350 video out on my KnoppMyth system, but only get audio with no video when I turn it on in TV viewing settings (but that's for another thread, obviously).

EDIT: As for fast motion quality problems, MPEG2 is prone to that if the bitrate isn't high enough. That's why variable bitrate encoding exists: to throw more bits at fast motion, or pans, or foliage, or audiences, or water, and less at static shots. Since you're recording at a constant bitrate with the 250/350, the faster the motion, the worse it looks. That's true of high-def sports too, for that matter.

So, can I set up extra high "bitrate and resolution" values and avoid this issue all together?

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

Well I've heard some say that, but at the bitrate they are talking about you're probably talking at least 4Gb/hr. that would make even my 200Gb drive get small very fast.

If you're talking about the quality issues other than interlacing, more is not always better IMO.

Since analog cable is fairly low-resolution, I usually digitize at 352x480 at 4Mbps. I think the quality is acceptable at that rate, and I can get 2 hours of video onto a DVD-R.

In order to get the same "quality" results at twice the resolution (720x480, the usual resolution for DVD video), I'd also have to double the bitrate to 8Mbps, but that means half the video onto a single DVD-R. And lots less recordings stored at any one time.

It might be worth trying 352x480 at 6Mbps and see how it looks.

EDIT: To compare, one page I'm looking at says that TiVo records at the following settings:

Best: 544x480, 5.8Mbps
High: 480x480, 3.5Mbps
Medium: 352x480, 2.6Mbps
Basic: 352x480, 1.47Mbps