Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV...

Actually, I started my computer and followed the instructions precisely. I
use a coaxial cable from my wall and plug it directly into my computer. The
quality is really bad. It is not terrible, but it is much poorer than a
regular TV screen.

Is this a settings problem?
Do I need to buy an encoder/decoder, or does my system already include one.

Thus far, I am greatly disappointed in the picture quality. I love
everything else about Windows Media Center 2005 EXCEPT the picture quality.
I purchased this hoping that I would have a picture similar to what I see on
my regular old 20" television. But the TV quality if far superior on the TV
than it is on my Digital Flat Panel Monitor. I figured that Microsoft would
have actually realized how to help us with our picture quality.

Please help! What can I do?!?!?
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

BTW, thanks for the help! I hope that someone can offer me good advice on
what to do!
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

the picture on my dell was also very poor when I firs set up the live TV.
I discovered that the RF connector to the TV card was not a very good fit. I
have spent several minutes under the desk jiggling the connector and making
sure it was seated properly. The picture is now very good but a slight
movement of the cable can make one channel become fuzzy until re-jiggled

hope my experience helps you



"ccchhhrrriiisss" <ccchhhrrriiisss.TakeThisOut@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:B4261474-F7D6-4450-882C-5445E430EB00@microsoft.com...
>I just received my new Dell E310 2005 Media Center Computer with otional
> Media Card and Remote. The computer is a 3.2 MgHz P-4 HT with 1 Gig RAM.
> I
> have a 19" UltraSharp Digital Flat Panel.
>
> I hooked up the computer, and everything looks great -- except for the
> LIVE
> and RECORDED TV. I have a regular coaxial cable hooked up from the wall
> directly into my Tuner Card into my computer. Even though the Record
> Quality
> is set at BEST, the TV quality is still poor.
>
> While setting up the program, the "pool players" setup video looked
> incredibly good! The resolution, sharpness and picture quality for the
> monitor is great for everything except for LIVE and RECORDED TV. I spoke
> with a friend of mine, and he told met that Live TV looks wonderful on his
> 2005 Microsoft Media Center PC -- even though he uses a coaxial cable.
> However, my quality is much "fuzzier" than what is found on my regular
> televison.
>
> Is there any way to improve the quality? It looks quite fuzzy. It looks
> as
> if the picture has bad "stretched out" resolution, since the smaller
> screen
> looks decent (when I continue watching TV while doing other things in the
> Media Center). Could it just be that a setting needs to be changed? This
> experience is quite disappointing, since I hoped to see to use this to
> record
> Live TV and burn to a DVD.
>
> Please help! I have searched through these threads, and it seems that
> there
> are ALOT of people experiencing the same problems -- but there are alot of
> different suggestions, and many of the suggestions do not seem to work for
> those individuals. Help!!!
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

I've got a month old Dell e510 also with the 19" ultrasharp FP and have been
similarly unimpressed by the video quality of live/recorded TV. I've been
perusing this newsgroup for solutions but have not had much luck. I've tried
the nvidia decoder and did not see a noticeable difference. Someone suggested
using an RF amplifier to boost the signal on the cable, but it made only a
very slight improvement and actually made some channels look worse.

I guess I've come to the realization that I need to lower my expectations,
it's just not possible to get video quality anywhere close to the "pool
players" video with all of the A to D to A to D conversion that takes place
when viewing TV. I suspect that the turner card (which I guess does the A to
D conversion) Dell uses is a low end model and not up to the task, but I'm
not yet ready to explore that route yet.

I'll keep checking on this newsgroup though in case someone comes up with a
solution.

BF

"ccchhhrrriiisss" wrote:

> I just received my new Dell E310 2005 Media Center Computer with otional
> Media Card and Remote. The computer is a 3.2 MgHz P-4 HT with 1 Gig RAM. I
> have a 19" UltraSharp Digital Flat Panel.
>
> I hooked up the computer, and everything looks great -- except for the LIVE
> and RECORDED TV. I have a regular coaxial cable hooked up from the wall
> directly into my Tuner Card into my computer. Even though the Record Quality
> is set at BEST, the TV quality is still poor.
>
> While setting up the program, the "pool players" setup video looked
> incredibly good! The resolution, sharpness and picture quality for the
> monitor is great for everything except for LIVE and RECORDED TV. I spoke
> with a friend of mine, and he told met that Live TV looks wonderful on his
> 2005 Microsoft Media Center PC -- even though he uses a coaxial cable.
> However, my quality is much "fuzzier" than what is found on my regular
> televison.
>
> Is there any way to improve the quality? It looks quite fuzzy. It looks as
> if the picture has bad "stretched out" resolution, since the smaller screen
> looks decent (when I continue watching TV while doing other things in the
> Media Center). Could it just be that a setting needs to be changed? This
> experience is quite disappointing, since I hoped to see to use this to record
> Live TV and burn to a DVD.
>
> Please help! I have searched through these threads, and it seems that there
> are ALOT of people experiencing the same problems -- but there are alot of
> different suggestions, and many of the suggestions do not seem to work for
> those individuals. Help!!!
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

JW wrote:
> I agree with what you say and another point in the food chain that can cause
> very poor SD PQ is the upscaling of the less than .4 mega pixels per frame
> 720x480 image from a DVD or from SD TV to the 1 megapixel per frame of a
> 720p display or the 2.1 megapixel per frame of a 1080p display. The
> upscaling algorithime used by either the PC's graphic card or by the
> displays firmware may do a very poor job of inventing the content of the
> additional pixels required and thus cause pixelation or what is known as the
> "clay face' images.

It's interesting that you use this term. You are apparently using it
to describe a loss of resolution, which I would usually call pixelation
(if larger pixels are visible) or "posterization" (if color gradient
areas suffer color quantization errors). (BTW, I would expect such
interpolation to be done by a DSP, using an algorithm at least as
sophisticated as bi-cubic interpolation, but I understand that not
all monitors do so.)

I have actually noticed a different, quite disturbing effect that
"clay face" captures perfectly!

It is a motion estimation artifact that usually occurs in a low-key
scene with backlit faces. The outlines of the faces track pretty
accurately with the character, but the features, isolated from the
outlines by black, seem to "drift" within the facial outline. The
relative drift between features and outline is very apparent since
humans are so good at pattern recognizing faces, and the effect is
truly wierd, as if the characters' features are wandering around on
their faces. I have seen this with HBO and TCM programming on
DirecTV, so there are, no doubt, "good" compressors at work.

I do not see it on DVDs. Clearly the firms that do compression for
DVDs are also sensitive to this problem, and have fixed it in their
non-real-time compression algorithms.

Apparently, "better" real-time compressors must learn to recognize
"probable faces" and lock the motion estimators to the outlines to
avoid this problem.

-michael


> The best DVD Decoders currently avaialble appear to be the ones that are now
> availble for the ATI XP 1300 Pro or better or the NVIDIA 6600gt or the new
> NVIDIA 7300 GS video cards.
>
> "Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon RemoveThis @aol.com> wrote in message
> news:vcWdncr-lds-yXTeRVn-uQ@comcast.com...
>
>>But you should also consider that there are many DVD recorders on
>>the market that do an *excellent* job encoding 720x480 in real time,
>>and they are, at most, one or two chips and a memory chip.
>>
>>In fact, the only "artifact" that I have seen is an occasional
>>breakup of the detail when movie credits are being scrolled in white
>>on black with lots of lines of small type! After a second or so, the
>>motion estimator recovers, and all is well. (It appears that a "crawl
>>mode" should be implemented as a mode in the next models.
>>
>>So if you are seeing quality less than off-the-air analog SD, there
>>may indeed be something wrong elsewhere in the processing chain.
>>
>>-michael
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

I like your color gradient term also. I did not invent the clay face term
but the first time I read it I thought it descrbed the effect perfectally.
Some PC monitors only dupplicate pixels during updcaling in order to prevent
the edges of small font text from being blurred by use of an algorithim
which is better applied to TVs.
The other problem you describe is due to poor motion compencation quality by
the hardware acceleration capabilities of the graphics card and the motion
compensation gets applied during the decoding and not during the display .
The best cards currently for motion compensation are the NVIDIA 6600GT or
better or the ATI X1300 Pro or better when used with the NVIDIA Decoder
The reason you don't see the problem often with film DVDs is because
although the DVDs are encoded are encoded in 480i the odd and even fields
are from the same instance in time so no motion compensation needs to be
applied and not 1/30 of a second apart like they are with video.
"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon.TakeThisOut@aol.com> wrote in message
news:G--dnW4hHaRTLXTeRVn-pw@comcast.com...
> JW wrote:
>> I agree with what you say and another point in the food chain that can
>> cause very poor SD PQ is the upscaling of the less than .4 mega pixels
>> per frame 720x480 image from a DVD or from SD TV to the 1 megapixel per
>> frame of a 720p display or the 2.1 megapixel per frame of a 1080p
>> display. The upscaling algorithime used by either the PC's graphic card
>> or by the displays firmware may do a very poor job of inventing the
>> content of the additional pixels required and thus cause pixelation or
>> what is known as the "clay face' images.
>
> It's interesting that you use this term. You are apparently using it
> to describe a loss of resolution, which I would usually call pixelation
> (if larger pixels are visible) or "posterization" (if color gradient
> areas suffer color quantization errors). (BTW, I would expect such
> interpolation to be done by a DSP, using an algorithm at least as
> sophisticated as bi-cubic interpolation, but I understand that not
> all monitors do so.)
>
> I have actually noticed a different, quite disturbing effect that
> "clay face" captures perfectly!
>
> It is a motion estimation artifact that usually occurs in a low-key
> scene with backlit faces. The outlines of the faces track pretty
> accurately with the character, but the features, isolated from the
> outlines by black, seem to "drift" within the facial outline. The
> relative drift between features and outline is very apparent since
> humans are so good at pattern recognizing faces, and the effect is
> truly wierd, as if the characters' features are wandering around on
> their faces. I have seen this with HBO and TCM programming on
> DirecTV, so there are, no doubt, "good" compressors at work.
>
> I do not see it on DVDs. Clearly the firms that do compression for
> DVDs are also sensitive to this problem, and have fixed it in their
> non-real-time compression algorithms.
>
> Apparently, "better" real-time compressors must learn to recognize
> "probable faces" and lock the motion estimators to the outlines to
> avoid this problem.
>
> -michael
>
>
>> The best DVD Decoders currently avaialble appear to be the ones that are
>> now availble for the ATI XP 1300 Pro or better or the NVIDIA 6600gt or
>> the new NVIDIA 7300 GS video cards.
>>
>> "Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon.TakeThisOut@aol.com> wrote in message
>> news:vcWdncr-lds-yXTeRVn-uQ@comcast.com...
>>
>>>But you should also consider that there are many DVD recorders on
>>>the market that do an *excellent* job encoding 720x480 in real time,
>>>and they are, at most, one or two chips and a memory chip.
>>>
>>>In fact, the only "artifact" that I have seen is an occasional
>>>breakup of the detail when movie credits are being scrolled in white
>>>on black with lots of lines of small type! After a second or so, the
>>>motion estimator recovers, and all is well. (It appears that a "crawl
>>>mode" should be implemented as a mode in the next models.
>>>
>>>So if you are seeing quality less than off-the-air analog SD, there
>>>may indeed be something wrong elsewhere in the processing chain.
>>>
>>>-michael
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

Thank you all, but I still don't feel that any of your solutions are helping
me very much yet.

As I stated before, my tuner card uses a coaxial cable. I thought that this
might have been the problem, but it seems that the sample music videos that
came with Windows Media Edition 2005 are also "fuzzy." Is this normal? Can
ANYONE see even television quality on their digital ultrasharp flat panels?

Do I need to download a driver for the picture quality to improve? Right
now, it is sadly disappointing. Yes, I love the features of my new WME 2005
computer. Everything is wonderful -- except for the picture quality while
playing LIVE TV, RECORDED TV, and the sample music videos. I haven't played
a DVD yet (since I am in my university dorm). I am beginning to wonder if it
is really possible to get a clear, non-fuzzy picture with the Media Tuner
Card and Remote.

If possible, could someone list the - steps - that I could go through in
order to attempt improving the picture quality? Thanks for any and all help
that you offer!

-Chris
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

Since the Sample Videos are also fuzzy the symptom is not caused by your
tuner card since is not involved.
The fuzzy video is caused by the de-interlacing and upscaling of the 480i
video. If a DVD is also fuzzy when you get a chance to try one then the
problem is not being caused by your Decoder or the hardware acceleration
quality provided by your graphics card.
I assume that you are connected to the moitor over a VGA interface and are
outputting to the monitor at its native resolution in order to get the best
quality PC desktop application quality. This means that the 480 line video
is being upscaled by your graphics card and poor quality upscaling could be
causing the problem if you desktop applications look fine. If you are
outputtig a lower resolution to your monitor than its native resolution then
the monitor is doing the upscaling and if both your video and your desktop
applications are fuzzy then the high resolution of the monitor is the cause
of the problem
It is a standard isssue with fixed pixels HDTVs that SD 480i TV programs
look poor as sompared to an good old CRT TV whereas HD programs look
fantastic.
There may not be any resolution to your problem other than sit farther from
the screen when watching TV or purchasing a HDTV tuner card to get local
stations digital trahmissions or upgrading your graphics card to one known
to provid better quality de-interlacing and upscaling.

"ccchhhrrriiisss" <ccchhhrrriiisss.TakeThisOut@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:FA705F0C-740B-4BE9-AA3C-C1C69643EFA3@microsoft.com...
> Thank you all, but I still don't feel that any of your solutions are
> helping
> me very much yet.
>
> As I stated before, my tuner card uses a coaxial cable. I thought that
> this
> might have been the problem, but it seems that the sample music videos
> that
> came with Windows Media Edition 2005 are also "fuzzy." Is this normal?
> Can
> ANYONE see even television quality on their digital ultrasharp flat
> panels?
>
> Do I need to download a driver for the picture quality to improve? Right
> now, it is sadly disappointing. Yes, I love the features of my new WME
> 2005
> computer. Everything is wonderful -- except for the picture quality while
> playing LIVE TV, RECORDED TV, and the sample music videos. I haven't
> played
> a DVD yet (since I am in my university dorm). I am beginning to wonder if
> it
> is really possible to get a clear, non-fuzzy picture with the Media Tuner
> Card and Remote.
>
> If possible, could someone list the - steps - that I could go through in
> order to attempt improving the picture quality? Thanks for any and all
> help
> that you offer!
>
> -Chris
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

The resolution of all other applications on my computer are fine. The
resolution for Windows, the "pool playing" setup videos, and downloaded movie
trailers in my PC is wonderful! But it is only when I am using Windows Media
Edition 2005 that I experience this poor quality of video. I don't see any
"blur" issues (that others have mentioned on this message board). Its just
that the quality looks like a very bad TV reception -- even though the cable
in my regular television looks great. When I play a DVD file on my computer
(without using Windows Media Edition 2005), the resolution is incredible. I
haven't tried a DVD yet on my WME, but when I do, I'll let you know how it
looks.

Should I mess with the digital monitor's resolution? Right now, it is set
up at 1024 x 768. Should I increase or decrease it? Would this make a
difference in the picture quality?

You are correct in that when I sit further back it looks better. I have a
19" digital ultrasharp flat panel LCD monitor. But when I stand ten feet
away, it is still no where near the quality of my flat television set. The
picture on my monitor looks "fuzzy" (for lack of a better word). Of course,
when I shrink the picture, the fuzziness is not nearly as evident. But it
seems that I should have experienced a better quality image.

Some people have mentioned that they have the same problem, but when the
burn a DVD, it looks good on their television. Should I try this?
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

Since I believe that the native resolution of your Dell monitor is 1280x1024
and not 1024x768 you should set your resolution to that and your PC
applications will look even sharper, You will probably need to increas the
font and windows apperance sizes to compensate as I have to do with my
1280x1024 Brand X 19" monitor.
From everything that you now say it is apparent that the primary problem
cause of the problem you are observing is due to the low quality MPEG2
encoder on your NTSC TV tuner card.
"ccchhhrrriiisss" <ccchhhrrriiisss.DeleteThis@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:A14F1BC1-CE17-4937-B49C-C5801907F17A@microsoft.com...
> The resolution of all other applications on my computer are fine. The
> resolution for Windows, the "pool playing" setup videos, and downloaded
> movie
> trailers in my PC is wonderful! But it is only when I am using Windows
> Media
> Edition 2005 that I experience this poor quality of video. I don't see
> any
> "blur" issues (that others have mentioned on this message board). Its
> just
> that the quality looks like a very bad TV reception -- even though the
> cable
> in my regular television looks great. When I play a DVD file on my
> computer
> (without using Windows Media Edition 2005), the resolution is incredible.
> I
> haven't tried a DVD yet on my WME, but when I do, I'll let you know how it
> looks.
>
> Should I mess with the digital monitor's resolution? Right now, it is set
> up at 1024 x 768. Should I increase or decrease it? Would this make a
> difference in the picture quality?
>
> You are correct in that when I sit further back it looks better. I have a
> 19" digital ultrasharp flat panel LCD monitor. But when I stand ten feet
> away, it is still no where near the quality of my flat television set.
> The
> picture on my monitor looks "fuzzy" (for lack of a better word). Of
> course,
> when I shrink the picture, the fuzziness is not nearly as evident. But it
> seems that I should have experienced a better quality image.
>
> Some people have mentioned that they have the same problem, but when the
> burn a DVD, it looks good on their television. Should I try this?
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

JW wrote:

<snip>

> The other problem you describe is due to poor motion compencation quality by
> the hardware acceleration capabilities of the graphics card and the motion
> compensation gets applied during the decoding and not during the display .
> The best cards currently for motion compensation are the NVIDIA 6600GT or
> better or the ATI X1300 Pro or better when used with the NVIDIA Decoder
> The reason you don't see the problem often with film DVDs is because
> although the DVDs are encoded are encoded in 480i the odd and even fields
> are from the same instance in time so no motion compensation needs to be
> applied and not 1/30 of a second apart like they are with video.

I have observed this effect independent of the video card.

For example, a DirecTV STB displays the problem on local network
shows and on HBO. One can reasonably expect that their STB is
designed to perfectly decode what it is sent.

MPEG decoding should be a completely deterministic operation, with
every pixel value determined by the incoming MPEG stream. Perhaps
some video cards/drivers are "cheating" and not actually doing a
full decompression algorithm.

This is not the case during compression, where information is
discarded based upon the encoder's heuristics. Different encoders
can produce *very* different results and be in "compliance" with
the standard. Often, different kinds of video input call for a
different compression heuristic.

-michael


> "Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon.DeleteThis@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:G--dnW4hHaRTLXTeRVn-pw@comcast.com...

<snip>

>>I have actually noticed a different, quite disturbing effect that
>>"clay face" captures perfectly!
>>
>>It is a motion estimation artifact that usually occurs in a low-key
>>scene with backlit faces. The outlines of the faces track pretty
>>accurately with the character, but the features, isolated from the
>>outlines by black, seem to "drift" within the facial outline. The
>>relative drift between features and outline is very apparent since
>>humans are so good at pattern recognizing faces, and the effect is
>>truly wierd, as if the characters' features are wandering around on
>>their faces. I have seen this with HBO and TCM programming on
>>DirecTV, so there are, no doubt, "good" compressors at work.
>>
>>I do not see it on DVDs. Clearly the firms that do compression for
>>DVDs are also sensitive to this problem, and have fixed it in their
>>non-real-time compression algorithms.
>>
>>Apparently, "better" real-time compressors must learn to recognize
>>"probable faces" and lock the motion estimators to the outlines to
>>avoid this problem.
>>
>>-michael
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

As this is an old post I don't know if you're still following it or not.

I think I'm having the same problem as you and I would be interested to know
if there is any improvement to recorded tv quality when it is player in
Windows Media Player (not Media Center)?
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV... 

As this is an old post I don't know if you're still following it or not.

I think I'm having the same problem as you and I would be interested to know
if there is any improvement to recorded tv quality when it is player in
Windows Media Player (not Media Center)?
 >> Stay informed about: Bad quality in Live and Recorded TV...