5. HQV Results

Here, HQV stands for Hollywood Quality Video, where the HQV DVD video benchmark consists of a regular DVD that includes numerous different scenes that present potential visual problems to a DVD decoder. Points are awarded if the decoder handles the problems so that viewers don’t see them; points are not awarded if it doesn’t do the job.

For this particular test, we changed the way things work to include the TV tuner cards in our signal processing chain. Ordinarily, you’d drop the HQV DVD into an internal player, fire it off and observe its appearance during playback through the CPU and graphics card out to the display. Here, we used an external, standalone DVD player (a Nimtec XXX) and routed its S-Video output into the S-Video input on the TV Capture card. We also compared that to the appearance when playing back through our internal player, and observed only small differences between the two (as you’d hope); we noticed more edge artifacts in the de-interlacing flag test and more Moire patterns in the 2:3 pulldown test also known as the Film detail test (see Table 3 and the Woligroski article cited in the next paragraph for more information).

Rather than stepping you through the entire sequence of tests and explaining them in detail, we refer you to Don Woligroski’s January 9, 2007, article for Tom’s Guide entitled Avivo vs. Purevideo, Round 1 wherein he walks readers through the whole test suite. Here, we provide a brief table instead that summarizes results for each TV capture card with a one-liner explanation and remarks for each test. We need only observe here that each test (or sub-test, when a particular test involves multiple versions or iterations) produces a maximum of 10 points, where a lower score indicates the degree to which the decoder could handle things perfectly.

We also observed less than a three-point difference between internal DVD playback results and TV card mediated playback results for each card (which is why we don’t also report those results separately). All in all, this indicates that video playback through these cards does not significantly degrade the incoming signal, nor does it introduce much apparent noise or distortion, if any. We’d give the Hauppauge card a slight edge based on our perceptual impressions as well as these results, but that difference is very small indeed.