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Poor Video Quality
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| It is highly recommended to begin by taking the steps described here; these three basic PC maintenance steps are essential to a computer's health and will help to avoid "stuttery" recordings.
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| 1. | Viruses, worms, et. Al. can cause all manner of problems from system crashes to loss of data. Professional programs to protect PC's against viruses are available, such as Network Associates' McAfee package, and Symantec's Norton Antivirus software. Some anti-virus software is free, and can be found on download sites such as Download.com and Tucows.com. Be sure to scan for and remove malware detected by the chosen scanner.
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| 2. | Spyware / Adware is installed on a PC without the user's consent or knowledge through Web sites, or is installed with other software packages. These programs run in the background, often sending information about the PC or its users over the Internet. In doing so, they slow a computer down, occupying the CPU and the Internet connection. Two very popular spyware detection and removal programs are free to personal users -- Patrick M. Kolla's SpyBot Search & Destroy and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE. Be sure to scan for and remove spyware detected by the chosen scanner.
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| 3. | Hard Disk fragmentation is not an easy phenomenon to explain, but the symptom it causes is a slowing, often drastic, of operations involving data transfer to and from the computer's hard disk drive. All modern versions of the Windows operating system include a disk defragmenter. In Windows XP, for example, it may be accessed via START BUTTON --> ALL PROGRAMS --> ACCESSORIES --> SYSTEM TOOLS --> Disk Defragmenter. Be sure to run a complete hard disk defragmentation prior to running Beyond TV.
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| Check the input to ensure that the tuner device is receiving a high-quality signal by inspecting the output provided by the TV-viewing software supplied with the tuner device (if applicable). What may look like just a little "grain" on the screen will look much worse once the video feed is compressed into a recording. Signal amplifiers, available at electronics stores, can make a big difference in providing a high-quality signal, especially where long cable runs, or splitting, is involved.
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| Ensure that no electronic devices are interfering with the signal.
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| · | Outside the PC, this could mean that the video cable passes close to an electronic device which causes some interference. Higher quality, shielded cabling will help to cut this interference to a minimum.
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| · | Inside the PC case, interference may be caused by peripherals (PCI / AGP, or onboard devices). Moving the PCI devices away from the tuner device, or moving the tuner device away from PCI or onboard devices, will help to cut down on interference encountered inside the case.
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| Using a different decoder for MPEG-2 playback may provide noticeable improvements, and is often a necessity on slower machines. See this Community article for a list of supported third-party MPEG-2 decoders and instructions for setup, and / or (if using Beyond TV 3.5.0. or newer) try changing the MPEG-2 decoder in the Viewscape interface by modifying the "Preferred MPEG-2 Decoder" value located in the Player Settings section.
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| If using Beyond TV as a fullscreen application, enabling "True Fullscreen" mode will help to cut CPU use drastically. To enable this feature, execute the BTVD3DSHELL.EXE executable with the /displaymode exclusivefs command-line option as described in the list of Command Line Options.
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| Note: This command will not function properly when displaying video with an ATI All-In-Wonder device.
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| Changing the "Video Renderer" setting located in the Player Settings section of the Viewscape Interface may increase the quality of playback as well.
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| Note: using the "Overlay" renderer on a VIVO card such as the ATI All-In-Wonder or the nVidia Personal Cinema will cause a drastic change in Live TV because the video feed is uncompressed. Time Shifting will be unavailable if using the Overlay renderer on such devices.
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| Quality Profiles are groups of settings governing attributes of a recording's quality level. Faster systems (>2.0 gHz, for example), or systems using hardware-encoding tuner devices (e.g. PVR-250), will be able to record at the highest quality settings available. The quality profile being used can be modified through the Recording Settings section of the ViewScape interface. The highest quality profiles configured by default in Beyond TV are labeled "Best."
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| On slower machines, the quality may seem poor because the quality profile being used is too demanding for the processor to record or to play. Lowering it via the same menu listed above is suggested.
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| It is advisable to reboot the computer and then to exit all other Windows applications before using of Beyond TV. Other programs can interfere with disk access and other resources Beyond TV needs.
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