WHy does tivo suck?

[Guest]

Picture quality is poor even on the "best quality" settings. I have a 61" DLP HDTV. Why do the Simpsons' colors bleed outside their borders? FYI they bleed right. I have tried all of the settings on the TV.

[indolikaa]

I am assuming you've run your Auto-Convergence routine?

And it's not a problem on your 'regular' input signal, either?

[Ste]

DLP's don't have convergence. Also DLP's are not supposed to bleed any colors. You try recording any other cartoon shows on that TiVO?

[Guest]

Yes.Overall it seems to happen with all pictures. Just not as noticeable with regular programs

[Ste]

Make sure you have your TiVO hooked up to your TV via s-video or component video (if it has it). Otherwise I don't know what to tell ya besides that your TiVO is a piece of crap and if you bought it recently go ahead and return it.

[junkmalle]

Part of the process of recording in MPEG is to reduce the resolution of the color components of the video. This has the effect of smearing colors -- usually to the right and down. The lower the resolution you record at the worse the effect will be. And it shows up more with synthetic images (cartoons, test patterns) than with real (movies, TV) video.

[j-a-w]

I agree that the quality is not the best. But there is no other option besides replay tv and the quality is the same to me. I don't think that they are going to make it dvd quality because of the amount of hard drive space it would take up. Also wondering what type of tv feed your tivo is getting. (analog,digital or sat.)

[junkmalle]

Oh, and Ste is right, if you are using a composite cable, switch to S-video or component. Composite smears the colors really badly.

[tjdmobile]

I don't know if this is already known, but my Philips Tivo (and any other except for DirecTivo) record in 480x480. This is an incredible resolution drop. Regular digital satellite broadcasts primarily in half-D1, with exceptions up to 512x480 for special exceptions and pay-per-view. In otherwords, Tivo is equivilant to x-SVCD.

If Tivo is important to you, and you live in the US, upgrade to DirecTivo. It will record the digital signal with no additional compression. Otherwise, Dish-DVR is similar to DirecTivo as it only records the incoming digital signal to the hard drive. It also records Dolby Digital signals from HBO and other premium channels.

If your feed is over the air, best option is to pick up a DVD-Recorder, as you can record in 720x480. If your feed is HDTV, again, pick up a DVD-Recorder and use the analog output from the decoder. You will have 720x480. Tivo will never have as good a picture as DVD.

TJD

[JSquare]

Picture quality is poor even on the "best quality" settings. I have a 61" DLP HDTV. Why do the Simpsons' colors bleed outside their borders? FYI they bleed right. I have tried all of the settings on the TV.

I was also disappointed the first time I tried a TiVo and ReplayTV on my 55" HDTV, but later end up buying a Tivo SA series 1 and after some hacking I changed the default resolution from 544x480 to 720x480 within TivoWeb, the image improvement was incredible, specially in DTV's PPV channels for which they allocate a higher bitrate. Also increased the Best settings to VBR=8,750,000 and CBR=9,800,000 thus giving no limitations to the encoder, gives much better quality recordings and VBR saves HD space since the source is digital the compression is almost similar to the original DSS signal. You can't do this on DTivos b/c there's no encoding involved and don't know if this could be done on series 2.

[tjdmobile]

Jsquare:

Incredible news. Very nice! If I still used my Series 1SA, I would be overjoyed. Oh well, maybe someday I will check that out!

TJD

[Capmaster]

Picture quality is poor even on the "best quality" settings. I have a 61" DLP HDTV. Why do the Simpsons' colors bleed outside their borders? FYI they bleed right. I have tried all of the settings on the TV.

That's not color bleed - with that big of a TV you're seeing the individual red, green and blue pixels