Video Quality Issue

[neumannu47]

My normal routine is to record shows on my ReplayTV in the stanard (low resolution) mode, transfer them to my computer with DVArchive, edit them with TVS/VRD, author them to DVD with Tsunami DVD Author, and play them on my TV with my Philips DVP642/17 DVD player. At no time is there any recoding of the video file.

It seems to me that the quality of the authored files on playback is lower than when the unedited file as recorded on and played directly from the ReplayTV to the same TV. Is that possible? I have not done extensive testing yet, but the only potential source of the problem that I see, if there is a problem, is the DVD player. Maybe the MPEG-2 decoder in the DVP642 is not what it should. The picture is perfectly fine with commercial DVDs, but the quality seems to be lacking with standard (low) definition files from ReplayTVs.

Before I spend the rest of the weekend on this, I would like to have some input. Am I overlooking any link in this chain to degrade the quality of the video?

[jameshgross]

IMHO you should always capture at the highest possible resolution.

[Baldrick]

What version of tda? The newest tda 3.0 may reconvert if it isn't 100% dvd compliant.
Have you compared the unedited video and the burned dvd in your computer with a software dvd player? do you see any difference?

[neumannu47]

TDA version 1.6. I just did a comparison of the authored file versus the authored MPEG file. There is no difference. My next step is to check an unauthored file. I'm thinking that my eyes are becoming more discerning. Either that, or the MPEG decoder in the ReplayTV is optimized for files recorded on itself such that its playback quality is better than the alternate playback methods I'm testing.

[neumannu47]

IMHO you should always capture at the highest possible resolution.

In principle, I agree with you. However, it is hard to see the difference on a regular TV between the high and low resolution modes on a ReplayTV. Plus, the high resolution files are not fully MPEG-2 compliant. As such, I have had trouble burning them to DVD in the past. The Medium resolution is supposed to be closest to MPEG standard, but that's just what I have read.