Picture Quality

[cford88]

Hey guys,

I built an HTPC a while ago and can't seem to get the picture to look even half way decent on the TV.

The followin are my specs

XP1800
512mb ram
1x 80gb (OS)
1x100gb (Media)
eVGA 6600gt 128mb
Hauppauge 150
Windows XP
SageTV 4.0

The system performs fine, records great and there is no lag usually although I could benefit going to 1gb ram. I am using the S-Video out on the 6600gt card and the picture is blurry and unreadable in windows. When I am in full screen in SageTV the picture is blurry and not full screen on the TV. I have an older Sony Trinitron 27" TV that has a beautiful picture but was wondering what I was missing. I have tried my JVC 32" as well and had the same results.

Neither TV is HD and I am using regular cable not Digital.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[IDversusEGO]

Neither TV is HD and I am using regular cable not Digital.

your 2 biggest problems right there. Any form of encoding will have some loss, especially on the fly, single pass encoding. so start with a dirty source (analog cable has the most inherent noise of all the tv signals), run it through an encoder, than display it at 27" on a low res TV and you get a blurry image. Not saying you can't do an HTPC on an SD tv, just saying text will be tough to read.

 

[CrimandEvil]

You can go into the NV control panel and up the sharpness of it alittle, are you using VMR9 render? For my TV (old SDTV connected via svideo) upping the sharpness alittle and using VMR9 as well as a good MPEG2 codec makes up for the crappy low quality resolution that comes with an SDTV.