Watching TV shows recorded with my desktop PC equipped with the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV tuner card is going very, very well. I have been impressed with the video quality. I have tried recording some shows in the lower quality that Media Center allows. At the lower quality you see artifacts, but it is not enough to detract from watching old shows. I have been getting into watching old Incredible Hulk shows from the 70’s I was a big fan, so it is interesting to see if there are any episodes I don’t remember at all. I have also recorded shows in Media Center’s highest quality and I can’t see anything wrong with the video on the device.
I just returned from a vacation at the coast. I bought a generic camcorder A/V cable from Radio Shack. It has a jack that plugs into the earphone jack of the Zune and it has yellow, white and red RCA connectors at the other end. It works great. It took a bit to figure it out. It seems that when plugged into the Zune the red cable is the video, and has to be plugged into the yellow socket on the TV.
Video quality from both record TV and movies copied from DVD with DVDFab Platinum look outstanding on a 25 inch TV. That’s all they had in the condo we stayed at. I will be testing it with my 65″ TV soon, but there is no option on the Zune for being connected to a 16:9 TV. I expect it will stretch the output and degrade the image. I’ll let you know the results in a future posting.
At this moment I am re-ripping a movie from DVD. The volume from the Zune when playing a movie on a TV is quite low. I turned on my laptop for one task the entire time on vacation. I launched DVDfab to see if it had any volume control. Sure enough it does. So I am re-ripping a movie with the volume set to 250%. I am hoping this will provide volume to match what I was getting from record TV without getting any distortion.
Stay tuned, there is more to come.
