Freeview Vs Sky image quality...

T

TheMagicalDaddy

Guest
Hi

I used to think that sky was quite excellent for picture quality but it seems recently to have fallen down quite a lot, BBC is not as good as it was and ITV 1 has become truely horrific with football becoming a blotchy ill washed out looking mess but c4 and c5 still manage to hold up quite well but overall im now quite disappointed with sky and im hoping that freeview will be a viable quality alternative.

What i want to do is capture the mpeg2 video to my pc in the cleanest way with as few conversions as possible so i can maintain the maximum possible quality, The question i really want to know is what would be the best option to go for?

I have searched for other posts on the image quality issue and it seems that what i have read so far is that freeview is considered a higher quality source but is this still the case as i vaguely remember seeing a post about freeview changing something to enable them to squeeze more channels in, Has this affected the video quality as it stands right now?

I really have three courses of action as far as i can see:

1) Buy a dvd recorder such as the pani e50 and record the sky stream via RGB in the recorder onto either dvd-ram or dvd-r then rip that onto on my pc via my dvd-rom drive.

2) Buy a freeview box and then simply get myself a d-sat pci card and record the stream directly to my hard disk thus cutting down on conversions.

3) Buy a freeview box and a pani e50 and record via RGB.

I do have some concerns about the d-sat pc cards as i have an old wintv card for analogue pc viewing and i found the capture quality poor as if it had some sort of strange interlacing tearing effect on the image when i tried to capture it, Every time there was fast movement this tearing effect seemed to be there. How do the newer digital pc cards shape up on video quality capturing?

And finally how do different box models effect picture quality? Are they all much of a muchness or do some cope better than others, Thats a question for sky boxes as well as freeview ones.

Lend me your views folks, Thanks.
 
I think you will be hard pressed to find someone with both DTT and Dsat who if they are being totally honest would not admit that DTT has the better picture for the standard terrestrial channels assuming good reception for both platfroms.

If all you want is to capture the channels that are on DTT then I would probably go for a PC card, no analogue conversions required between a seperate STB and the PC.

Not used them myself but these guys seem to get a good write up....Nebula

Of course if you also want to capture channels that are only on SKY then you will need to use a seperate capture device.
Digibox RGB to a DVD recorder or in the case of SKY+ use the s-video to feed a capture card in a PC, very happy with the results I am getting although it has it's limitations.
 

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