Capture Card Yields Disappointing Quality

[TomBrooklyn]

I purchased and installed a Hauppauge 150PVR TV Capture device.

I was expecting digital quality considerably better than a VHS tape recording. Boy, was I wrong. The video is not nearly as clear or detailed as VHS, and the audio skips and is out of synch.

Am I doing something wrong or is this par for a TV Capture card.

[DrP]

www.shspvr.com - go to the forum, download the latest beta driver. It resolves blurriness for PAL composite users. Unfortauntely it introduces a -6db audio clip limiter, the only workaround is turn down your audio source.

[idigvb]

I remember reading that s-video is a better option, but it introduces extra white or something to that effect.

[TomBrooklyn]

I remember reading that s-video is a better option, but it introduces extra white or something to that effect.
Hi idgvb,
Right now I have the input cable going directly to the card and my TV is not even hooked up. When I hook the TV back up, I will have the choice of splitting the signal and putting one cable on the TV and one on the card, or putting one on the TV and outputing from there to the card via an S-Video cable.

[TomBrooklyn]

www.shspvr.com - go to the forum, download the latest beta driver. It resolves blurriness for PAL composite users. Unfortauntely it introduces a -6db audio clip limiter, the only workaround is turn down your audio source.
Hi Dr P,
Thanks for that link. I didn't know about that site. Since it's dedicated to WIN-TV I should be able to find some good tips there.

I'm not sure if the latest beta driver is the solution, but I'll look into that more.

BTW, in case I gave the wrong impression, the picture I'm getting is not terrible, it's just a little less sharp than what I expected.

And I'm not sure what 'PAL composite' means.

[DrP]

PAL composite is the TV signalling format used in parts of Europe and Australia. There was a known problem with the driver for the PVR150 that caused the comb filter to excessively blur things up when pulling video from the composite or tuner input with PAL. AFAIK it was never a problem with NTSC.

I have a setup with a PVR150 recording from the svideo output of a DVB-s pay tv box, the output MPEG2 file seems quite OK to me, comparable to the quality output by a canopus ADVC100 connected to the same DVB-s box via svideo.

You have to becareful comparing the apparent sharpness of captures from different devices. I've seen some raw capture cards have a fair bit of sharpening with their default configuration making the picture sharper than the source video, even sharper than the MPEG/2 video that the DVB-s box was fed with (which just isn't right).