New Capture Card, Crappy Quality

[Amaze]

I just got a hauppauge wintv go2, and I've hooked everything up. but the picture quality is just plain crappy to say the least. very blocky kinda. I have the tuner connected to my vcr, wich in turn is connected to the antenna cable and dvd player. I have not yet tested connecting directly to the dvd player, but it did not look good going thru the vcr. same when I connected directly to antenna-cable. it looked bad in the accompanying pvr software, and even worse in virtual vcr. any suggestions? I'll post back when I've tried the dvd-player(it's a pain in the ass, wires you know).

[jameshgross]

I have found Hauppauge tech support to be very good. Give them a e-mail and describe your problem.
I the mean time try downloading the latest drivers and installing them.

[junkmalle]

I'm not sure but I think the WinTV GO2 only captures at low resolutions. What frame size are you capturing at? 352x288 maybe? You won't get a nice clear picture with low resolution captures like that.

[thecoalman]

Another thing is video will never look as good on monitor as it will on a TV. Try burning a test disc for comparison.

[spectroelectro]

I bought an el cheapo card (LeadTek WinFast TV 2000) and had the same problem initially. Turned out to be the crappy DV codecs they supplied. The DV codec sucked major ass. Produced the same kind of massively piexlated picture you're describing.

So I substituted the huffyuv codec for the native DV codec and got a massive improvement in picture quality. Ditto the Mainconcept DV codec. Using either produced much better results.

You might try that. In the capture program that comes with the card you can typically go in and open up a window to see what codecs are available on your computer and choose a different one. If you have a high-quality software codec like huffyuv loaded, trying changing to that codec and create a new capture profile and save it. Then see what results you get.

Chances are you'll be pleasantly surprised. Even el cheapo video cards can do a shockingly good job if you use a high-quality codec like huffyuv to capture instead of the (usually) junky codecs supplied by the mfr.

[junkmalle]

From what I've read the CX2388x chipset is used on the WinTV Go2. It is capable of capturing at up to 768x576 (PAL).

Other possible problems:

You might be seeing interlaced video on the computer monitor. This will result in "comb lines" whenever anything moves. Deinterlacing may just give a blurry picture.

If you're capturing to MPEG or some other lossy codec you may be using too low a bitrate.