Quote:
Originally Posted by Whitey1977
Is it just me or is live tv pq even worse than a media centre PC?
The live TV pq has never been perfect but i put up with it for the functionality of time shift etc. But the xbox 360 extender is even worse. People generally look like they are all sun burnt and the smearing is bad.
DVD, wmv-hd, .ts look great so I know its not the tv setup.
May be I'm expecting too much from an analogue capature source
(PVR250MCE from sky digital)
I think when sky release HD I won't be using MCE any more for TV which is a shame really because I love MCE
Whitey
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Interesting thread.
I have been playing about with connecting my Xbox 360 to my main screen and I do see a big difference in the picture.
I have an elonex media centre pc which is connected to a pioneer 506xde via dvi to hdmi. I have the FiredTV box to give me sky, which gives a much better picture than when the sky box was fed via svideo.
I output 720p (I use powerstrip to generate a 1216 x 688 at 50hz resolution to avoid overscan)from the pc which the pioneer converts to 750p. My graphics card is an ATI Radeon 300 and I use the NVidia MPEG decoder which is much better for my setup than the Power DVD one that came with the system.
Picture quality is good although I would still say not as good as my SkyHD box fed via HDMI direct to the plasma. It tends to be a little dark although the NVidia does allow you to tweak the settings which results in a good picture overall.
I have the xbox 360 set up to feed my LG 23" LCD in my bedroom and the picture is fine being fed by SCART at 576i. However, I wanted to investigate the possibility of getting the media pc out of the living room. If I put it in my AV cabinet it tends to overheat, particularly in the summer, so at the moment it is just sitting on top which is not ideal.
So I brought the xbox downstairs and hooked it up at the same time as the media pc so that I could compare.
First I tried the VGA connector. Although this gives an exact pixel match for the screen I can only get 60hz which is a restriction on my screen. The picture looked much better to me than the media pc, but suffered from a lot of judder on faster moving stuff like sports.
So I bought the HD component cable. I went for the Joytech cable rather than the microsoft version as it was a little cheaper and also had an svideo and composite cable.(that may have been a mistake!)
A a side note, why the hell are these cables so long and chunky?
Anyway, the component setup was a little clunky. I had loaded the latest software upgrade so the new resolutions were available. Initially, I looked at 720p output which again is converted to 750p by the pioneer media box. It was a little jerky and there was a problem with lipsync over the optical cable to my amp. If I switched back to SD component (a switch on the cable) then I believe that the output reverted back to 576i which gets converted to 625i by the pioneer. This gave a much smoother picture and worked well. I was tempted to look at the picture using the SCART but I ran out of time - maybe I will try it next weekend.
When comparing the xbox output to the media pc output the one really big difference was the brightness of the picture. I had the same settings for each input on the plasma and the xbox picture was very muted. You could see this clearly on the MCE menus. When you move the focus from the option s to the programs in MyTV the highlighted side goes from white to a shaded blue. This was barely perceptible on the xbox picture whereas the media pc picture was very vibrant.
It was evident again if I ran some of the WM HD clips. The media pc picture looked much stronger whereas on the xbox the colours were very muted.
It may be that I need to run the DVD Essentials disc on the xbox and that it just needs an adjustment to the settings but there is a very striking difference in the picture.
Does anyone else have any experience of this?
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