PVR-250 Post Processing vs Transcode Quality

[pmurnane]

Folks:

First post, so please forgive if this is a FAQ (didn't find it in my searches, tho).

I'm capturing cable TV broadcasts with a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250, and am am getting some marginal quality mpeg-2 files (chroma shifts & color oversaturation, mostly). My question is:

I know I can improve the quality of my captures with some post processing using VirtualDub or AviSynth, but will the loss in quality from re-encoding more than offset the improvements from the post processing?

I want to burn my captures to DVD and play them in stand-alone devices, so running filters during playback is pretty much not an option.

Thanks in Advance,
--Phil

[jggimi]

You will likely hear from other PVR-250 users. Without having an opinion on what the results might look like (I don't have the device), I think you may want to experiment, and see for yourself. Quality is subjective, and, depending on the filters you use, you may or may not like the results.

But if I'm not mistaken, the PVR-250 can encode MPEG-2 at 12mbps, which is higher than DVD. You might attempt a few test captures at that bitrate, frameserve with AviSynth into an MPEG-2 encoder, and see what the results look like.