Picture Quality

[billmarc]

Can anyone enlighten me regarding the picture quality that the various PVRs provide? I have both E* and D* so I am covered there, but I was at a friend's house who has ReplayTV and I admit that I am indeed impressed with what these things can do, but I was disappointed in the ReplayTV picture quality. The picture was "soft," both in playback mode and in live mode. The crispness was missing. The crispness was there when viewing the TV without going through ReplayTV.
Are both the E" and Tivo units like that, too? I can live with it, but I admit that I was a little disappointed.

Billmarc

[Karl Foster]

All E* and D* branded PVR's record exact quality that is received from the provider. The picture quality is excellent. Once you have a PVR, you'll wonder how you watched tv without one.

[Mark Holtz]

The Replay unit (as well as the Tivo Unit) has a MPEG encoder chip inside the player itself. You probably have a menu option that says "Quality" on it, where the higher quality takes up more disk space, but the lower quality takes up less disk space. This is dependent on the quality of the source.

The intergrated DishPVR and DirecTV with DVR (aka DirecTivos)/UltimateTVs lack this MPEG encoder chip because the PVRs record the datastream as it comes down for the satellite. The MPEG compression takes place at the uplink centers which MPEG encoders that are more sophisticated than what is included in the standalone units.

Once you have a PVR, the biggest complaint you will have is... there isn't enough disk space.