[mythtv-users] Video Quality

[Damon Haas]

On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 12:28, Alan Snyder wrote:

> 
> With a dirt-cheap bt878 capture card, generic
> GEForce-2 video card, and mid-90's 27" TV, with myth doing
> MPEG-4 at 640x480, 2200kbps, the difference between live TV
> through myth and live TV off the cable is noticable but
> not bothersome.  The CNN "crawl" is a little jumpy.  There's
> some loss of detail in the highlights (I think that might
> be a bt878 chipset issue).  Up close (closer than I watch),
> some blockiness is present (replacing the less noticable noise
> in an analog picture).  Football can seem harder to follow,
> probably because of the limitations of the compression settings
> to handle the frame-to-frame changes in content.  But overall,
> the difference is similar to the difference between a good cable
> signal and an "OK" cable signal.  I do notice that for certain
> channels where the cable signal is weaker, the noise in the 
> original results in more artifacts in the processed video.
> This is most likely because the compression scheme needs to
> deal with all that extra "information."

Before I go through and do this I need to be clear on this one- is
watching sports not very good through mythtv?  If I am watching hockey
or football on a large TV, having the ability to pause live TV would
cause large amounts of distortion?  How noticeable is the difference
between a recording and live TV when watching sports?  Thanks for any
information.