# Tivo and large LCD TV's



## futureechos (Jan 2, 2006)

Tivo Series 1, cachecard, networked. SKY Digital.

MY old 29inch 4:3 CRT is giving up, the green gun is on its way out.

I'm considering a 37" LCD, but from what I've seen some analogue signals and even some freeview digitals can look worse on a large LCD.

Does anyone have a large LCD with their Tivo S1? Does it look OK if recorded at a lower quality? I was thinking if enabling the (bit 0?) hack that gives better quality but I'll need to increase my disk size, I still have the old 40Gb original disk. )

I know HD looks great through an LCD but I don't have any HD sources at the moment. I don't want Sky HD yet. Would the LCD look worse than a CRT with tivo?

Thanks
futureechos.


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## aerialplug (Oct 20, 2000)

The short answer is almost certainly yes, sadly.

My experience of MPEG on LCD/Plasma is that it looks lousy whatever the source, be it Freeview, Sky or TiVo. Most mpeg encoding is tweaked for display on tube screens not LCD/Plasma where the dynamic is different.

Some more advanced screens I've seen have options to try to counteract the mpeg encoding but I've never been happy with flat screen TVs displaying digital.

HD is different - the encoding here is at a much higher bit rate (though for how long...) and also is fine tuned to be displayed on LCD/Plasma as almost all current displays for HD are this format. Watching Wimbledon and switching between BBC1 and BBC HD - BOY can you tell the difference immediately, with blocking and ringing on the picture not to mention the inevitable loss in resolution!

Oh, and be warned, mode 0 doesn't work properly on all TiVos. Mine suffers from grey flashes at the bottom of the picture every so often.


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## futureechos (Jan 2, 2006)

aerialplug said:


> The short answer is almost certainly yes, sadly.
> 
> My experience of MPEG on LCD/Plasma is that it looks lousy whatever the source, be it Freeview, Sky or TiVo. Most mpeg encoding is tweaked for display on tube screens not LCD/Plasma where the dynamic is different.


Thanks for the info. Does anyone have a large LCD and are happy with the tivo input?


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## wonderboy (May 27, 2003)

I'm pretty Happy with my 42" LCD. I have mode 0 working without any flashes though.

Only time I wasn't too happy was watching the football, where I switched to AUX and watched the Sky output direct. And I still wasn't too happy, I guess I'll have to wait for a HD tivo!


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

I went from being satisfied with "medium quality" on a 28" CRT to being unsatified with even mode 0 on a new 37" LCD

Then I realised even watching direct though aux the picture was blocky - it wasn't tivo's compression, but the original broadcast mpeg that I could see.

I ended up fixing it by reducing contrast on the tv, turning off the "sharpness" control on the tv, and turning on the "mpeg smoothing" on the tv (panasonic)

Bizarrely, it also looks better using composite instead of rgb in the tivo scart settings.RGB is sharper, but shows jaggies.... and the tv can do "3d comb" (deinterlacing) on composite but not on rgb.

Overall, it took some tweaking, but now I do have a much better picture than I had with the 28" CRT(its in another room, so easy to compare).

As above, LCDs in general show up mpeg artifacts even on broadcast mpeg,
due to their high contrast, CRTs flatter to deceive...


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## HomieG (Feb 17, 2003)

Don't know if you consider a 32" LCD TV a large LCD, but I just purchased one (Sony KDL32S2000 32" Bravia Flat Panel LCD HDTV). I have analog and digital cable. I think the digital looks wonderful on the LCD, whether in SD or HD, and don't see the artifacts others speak of. I too was very concerned about this after reading several reviews which stated it as a problem, on the exact TV I bought. I sure don't see it at my end, at least on the 32" LCD TV.


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## IainJH (Mar 27, 2002)

Maybe off topic (slightly) but I went through the same questions and ended up buying a plasma, not an LCD. I felt the LCD's were amazingly sharp but just too unforgiving of poor quality inputs. We did almost buy a 32" bravia LCD as it was so good, but for our room felt the lower res Panasonic 37 PX60 was for us and suffered even less from the artifacting problems. I run my Tivo in Mode0 though...


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## aerialplug (Oct 20, 2000)

mikerr said:


> I ended up fixing it by reducing contrast on the tv, turning off the "sharpness" control on the tv, and turning on the "mpeg smoothing" on the tv (panasonic)
> 
> Bizarrely, it also looks better using composite instead of rgb in the tivo scart settings.RGB is sharper, but shows jaggies.... and the tv can do "3d comb" (deinterlacing) on composite but not on rgb.
> 
> Overall, it took some tweaking, but now I do have a much better picture than I had with the 28" CRT(its in another room, so easy to compare).


You can go a long way by changing from the manufactuer's defaults. On recent TVs they're usually set up to make HD look really crisp and sharp in the shop demos - whether it's a PC running HD or the more recent test transmissions.


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## cyril (Sep 5, 2001)

For sizes 42 and above I would recommend plasma- I find mode 0 acceptable on a 42 inch plasma. Below 37 is almost entirely LCD territory.
Apart from the Pioneer 5000, the Fujitsu 58 series are the best plasmas on the UK market IMHO.

If you have a screen larger than 50 inch you will probably have no option other than to go with Sky HD IMHO, unless you sit more than 20 feet away and/or have a 2000 quid Video Processor/scaler.


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## B33K34 (Feb 9, 2003)

A couple of questions here - is there much difference in the scalers built into the big brand sets and are the inbuilt scalers likely to get much better?

If switching from Tivo to a WinMCE PVR how do you feed the screen - presumably if feeding the screen via a DVI input then there is the option of doing the scaling in the MCE box rather than the screen. 

I'm still undecided whether to buy a 40" LCD now (i've been impressed with the Sony Bravia's I've seen) or to wait another year or so. In the short term i'd probably use Tivo as the source but move to WinMCE when Vista lauches and free to air HD is available.


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## aerialplug (Oct 20, 2000)

cyril said:


> If you have a screen larger than 50 inch you will probably have no option other than to go with Sky HD IMHO, unless you sit more than 20 feet away and/or have a 2000 quid Video Processor/scaler.


Bear in mind that all manufaturers use the rule of thumb that the minumum viewing distance for any display is three times the diagonal. this is true both for screen artefacts and also MPEG encoding and is still valid (though less so) for HD. So, a 50 inch plasma should not be viewed any closer than 12-13 feet away and probably a little further.


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## Ian_m (Jan 9, 2001)

B33K34 said:


> A couple of questions here - is there much difference in the scalers built into the big brand sets and are the inbuilt scalers likely to get much better?.


Yes. Why do you think there is a growing market in £1000 scalers ? Why do you think the likes of John Lewis, Sony shop etc display their HD panels with conventional SD DVD's fed through a scaler ?

Did briefly play/demo at work with a HD LCD (Sharp ?) scaled through a Lumagen (?) scaler. Scaler off, picture looked washed out, looked as if watching through a fine net curtain, scaler on bright crisp colours, little blocking. Main issue was revealed the limitations of LCD vs Plasma and until things improve on LCD front steer clear. We were being demoed a while back, as most shop display plasmas/lCD's PC's were not HD capable (though display were). Not really necessary now as HD outputs are appearing on display engines.


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## rwtomkins (Jul 14, 2003)

I recently got a 32 inch LCD (Toshiba 32WLT66) and my experience so far is a) DVD is stunning, b) Freeview through a Digifusion FVRT200 is excellent provided you sit far enough away (I've learned this is very important with flat panel TVs) and c) an unmodified TiVo with a Sony Freeview box as input is very poor even when set to Best Quality because of bad definition and way too much contrast. I've just got the TiVo mode 0 enabled and had the contrast adjusted and it's now very much better but still the lowest quality of the three sources and there's still too much contrast. However I haven't finished tweaking and testing yet - I'm going to trying testing it with a different set-top box, try switching from RGB to composite and try the MPEG smoothing trick mentioned above (thanks!).


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## fade2grey (Oct 25, 2005)

I run a standard tivo on a 42" HD plasma & find the quality's lacking, I've upgraded the hard disk in prep for mode 0 tweeks when I get time in the hopes it'll improve, sadly if it doesn't get better I might have to consider a topfield or sky!


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## rwtomkins (Jul 14, 2003)

I don't want to sound too negative about mode 0, IMHO it provides a good result and is well worth doing, just as long as you don't go into it expecting perfection. It does probably need to be accompanied by the contrast fix, too.


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## Cainam (May 25, 2004)

Aren't there 2 things getting confused here?

Mode 0 changes the resolution which the program is saved at, which really needs an increase in the bit rates, etc.

The contrast problem is NOT caused by Mode 0 though - it is caused the viewing the output in RGB. 

So if you record something in Mode 0, you can play it back in RGB mode (problems with contrast unless you fix them with iicsetw) or in PAL mode (and the contrast should be fine, although the picture will not be as 'sharp')


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## pauljs (Feb 11, 2001)

I still use best quality on my 40" Sony. the quality is ok at normal viewing distances


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## scottere (Oct 9, 2002)

futureechos said:


> Thanks for the info. Does anyone have a large LCD and are happy with the tivo input?


I have a 46" Samsung LCD.

I have a fairly unusual setup in that my units are through a wall from the TV, meaning I'm quite limited with the cabling I can used.

As I couldn't get a scart cable through the hole in the wall, I was left for a while running a composite cable from the TiVo to the TV. Remarkably, this gave an excellent picture. No-one believes me unless they've seen it, but it really was excellent.

I then got a Pioneer VSX-AX2 amp, which does video switching. I put the same compsite input into it, and then it converted to component and sent it to the TV. The picture with this setup isn't as good, but it's certainly not dreadful. I'm getting a Cinemateq Picture Optimizer to accept an RGB signal from TiVo, and convert this to component a bit more effectively.

I record at best quality, which isn't a problem as I've got a 160 GB TiVo.

I either have a very unusual opinion of what makes a good picture, or the Samsung does a better job than other LCDs.


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