Vista MCE live TV blurry

[Dia01]

Any advice much appreciated. Setup a HTPC, running Vista Home Premium 32bit and for the TV Tuner I am using a Dvico FusionHDTV DVB-T PCI-Express card. Now, watching the live TV via the MCE the picture is quite blurry and not at all the digital quality expected. Using the software supplied with the card, the picture quality is very acceptable, quicker channel changes also, but I do have a little trouble with the buggy software and I do not want to setup the cards own infared reciever to control the software as I'm currently using a universal logitech remote and an Imon reciever integrated into the HTPC case.

What I would prefer is only to use Vista MCE to keep every tidy but not happy with the quality. Is there any decoder tweaks or something that can be done to allow the same image quality through MCE as Fusion software offers?

[Deusxmachina]

First guess is MCE is playing the file with a completely different video decoder (codec) than the other software is. I don't know how easy that is to change in MCE, but it should be able to be changed in options somewhere. I don't know if you have mpeg2 there or now h.264 or what for broadcast TV. Looks like the card is for mpeg2. If so, my first choice for no-problem playback would be Gabest MPV video decoder. Sometimes computers just simply don't like one decoder or another for some reason.

Second guess is if the video is interlaced that MCE/the decoder is using a different interlacing setting. Blurry/ghosting on movement with interlaced video often means it's using Blend. Try Bob or even Weave if you can. Weave will likely look jaggy, but I'll take jaggy over blurry.

Third guess is MCE is using Overlay or VMR for video output and Fusion is using the opposite one and your computer or video card prefers the opposite one.

[Frogger]

try installing the NVIDIA® PureVideo™ info http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html
never mind just checked the readme =NOTE: The PureVideo Decoder is not supported under Microsoft Windows Vista

[EnglishLion]

Are you running the tv-card supplied software in a window on the desktop or in full screen mode? Is the blurring on stills as well as moving or just on moving images? Is it on live tv only or also on recorded? Does it blur on non-tv video files (mpg4 etc)?

Do you have your mce interface set to display to the full native resolution of your tv? I had a problem getting MCE XP to display correctly on my CRT widescreen at first but after some fiddling I got it going. If your MCE is displaying in a mode below the native of your screen then you may find blurring from the extrapolation.

Also fiddle a bit with your video drivers settings, I'm using an S-video output on my htpc and I find that the flicker fix option causes blurryness on fast moving images.