[mythtv-users] Advice on adding a second capture card

[John Biundo]

mrwester wrote:
> The blurring you are referring to is deinterlacing artifacts and has nothing
> to do with the capture card- rather the video card/display.  

Thanks for that diagnosis.  I've complained about this before, and I've 
certainly heard of deinterlacing artifacts, but I wasn't sure whether 
tha'ts what I was seeing.  By the way, I think the implication from your 
statemet is that some video cards might do better than others w.r.t. 
deinterlacing artifacts, no?  Is there a better alternative to the 
FX5200 w.r.t. eliminating deinterlacing artifacts.  Perhaps the 350?

I've tried playing with a bunch of different settings, but none have 
made much of an improvement.  I would categorize the sports as "barely 
watchable", which is prompting me to have a "pass-through" mode (an a/b 
switch) so that I can watch football "raw from the cable" instead of 
through the PVR.  I was hoping the 350 (mainly via the TV out) might 
provide a little better picture.

> 
> You will probably hear more to the contrary from this list as this question
> has been asked before, but in my hands, the TV-out of the PVR-350 cannot be
> beat for  SD  tv viewing...  When I ran the TV-out of my PVR-350 I saw no
> deinterlacing artifacts and no stutter on the CNN ticker.  
Ahhh... that's what I'm hoping for.  This is exactly what I was asking 
above.

My machine is an
> XP2900+ and since adding an HDTV tuner I've switched to a FX5200 via DVI to
> a 1280x768 LCD panel running at native resolution.  While HDTV looks great,
> running at about 65% CPU without XvMC for a 1080i stream, in my opinion the
> TV-out of the PVR-350 offers better SD picture without deinterlacing
> artifacts than the DVI out of my FX5200. 
Sounds good.  My TV is, of course, SD.

> As far as issues when adding another card, if you're staying within the
> Hauppauge PVR-XXX  world of IVTV, it should be pretty straightforward.  
I would think so.  But I seem to see lots of stuff along the lines of "I 
added a second card and my machine went belly up...".

Thanks for the reply.

Cheers,
john