TiVo Community Forums Archives - Tivo "Live TV" Question

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Tivo "Live TV" Question
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Posted by: Bubbamill

Hello,

I'v just purchased my first Tivo (Series-2 40 hr). My plan is to remove the original disk and replace it with twin Maxtor 120's. So far, all I've done is watch "live TV" to get a feel for how it operates. Is it just me, or is the picture quality while watching live TV less than desired?

I realize that live really means digitized, written to disk, read back, and converted back to analog, but I was hoping that the quality would have been better.

I am using a Sony Wega 36" direct view set with a pretty decent cable feed (direct, no convertor box). Compared to looking at the cable feed directly, the Tivo live signal shows definite degradation, especially in the background scenes where colors tend to be more uniform. The defect looks a little pixelated and it almost looks like the background is crawling. I know this sounds goofy, but that's what it looks like to me.

I will admit that some channels look better than others, but none look as good as the straight cable feed. Given the popularity of Tivo and all of the positive comments, have people just accepted the degradation? Or am I just being too picky?

Thanks for any comments.

Posted by: Robert S

Welcome to the wonderful world of Superb High Quality Digital Television - the world of the future! (Translates roughly as, "we'll call it Superb and High Quality and just hope that you don't notice that a good analogue feed is actually better - afterall, once we pull the plug on analogue, you won't have anything to compare it to").

Yes, the TiVo does degrade the picture slightly, but most people are using theirs with digital cable or satellite feeds that add these sorts of artefacts at source. (My digital cable feed is about the same as a TiVo recording on High).

Hopefully you'll get used to it, although I do find that because digital artefacts tend to pop-up when a particular frame is hard to compress they're harder to ignore than the uniform cruddiness of VHS.

You might well find yourself watching live programming directly and only using the TiVo when you need it.

Posted by: k2ue

quote:
Originally posted by Bubbamill
Hello,

I will admit that some channels look better than others, but none look as good as the straight cable feed. Given the popularity of Tivo and all of the positive comments, have people just accepted the degradation? Or am I just being too picky?

Thanks for any comments.

Are you feeding S-video to the Sony?

Posted by: Bubbamill

Robert,

Thank you for your reply. It's good to know that I'm not too crazy. The picture quality from the Tivo live feed is about the same as the picture from my Phillips DVDRW. Since I onlly watch the Phillips on occassion, I have lived with it. I guess I assumed that Tivo would be better since it is intended to be used all of the time.

I did manage to improve the signal somewhat by adding a 10db booster amp to the main cable line where it enters the house. I realized today that the TV is fed off of the first cable feed split while the Tivo is fed off of the third splitter. Boosting the signal helped clean up some of the background noise and bring it closer to the raw cable feed.

Oh, and to answer K2ue, I am using the S-video output from the Tivo to the Sony.

Thanks again!

Posted by: Robert S

The encoding scheme in the TiVo is identical to that in your DVD recorder - MPEG-2. Obviously the bit-rate depends on the quality setting, but it's basically the same thing.

All digital codecs respond very poorly to noisy signals because they can't distinguish between noise and detail and therefore end up throwing away both. So, the cleaner you can get the TiVo's feed, the better.