Re: Picture quality

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Scott:

This came up on another thread as well recently. Unfortunately, your DirecTivo has somewhat of an unfair advantage over MCE. It gets the digital signal from the satellite and records it straight to disk. Directv will not allow the digital signal to leave their box, so the only option for MCE is to take an analog feed.

MCE takes an analog feed off of SVideo from the Directv box. It then encodes it to digital in order to write it to the hard drive. Then is decodes it to analog again to to allow it to be displayed on your TV. This accounts for the quality difference between the two.

Primarily responsible for the quality in your setup is the Hauppauge PVR-500, which is a decent card. I've noticed some blocky issues when playing back Hauppauge video over the XBox. In my tests, the ATI TV Wonder Elite performed somewhat better using the XBox extender.
http://www.thenears.com/?p=98

Cheers,
Pete

Scott Micale wrote:
I just finished setting up my MCE and am wondering about my picture quality versus my DirecTV Tivo box. I have a Hughes GAEB0A receiver hooked to my MCE with a Gateway 15" LCD attached to it. The picture quality is ok, but not really clear like my Tivo box that is connected to my 57" Toshiba Widescreen Projection TV. On my TV I have my XBox connected to hit using the XBox Extender. The picture there using the xbox extender is not clear either, like when I switch inputs to my Tivo box. What would cause this and is there anyway to clear it up? On My MCE I am connected to the Hughes receiver via the S-Video port and have my coax coming into the receiver from the dish. I have a AIW 8500DV graphic card (Which I know is not on the MCE compatibility list) and a Hauppauge Win-TV PVR 500MCE Tuner. I was thinking about bringing my Tivo box up and hooking it to my MCE and see if that makes a difference. I am not sure it will. Any help or ideas on this would be great.

Thanks

.

Relevant Pages

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