trying to figure out how to imporve the signal on my htpc a bit.. the tv signal is split from my box via a 4 way splitter but the cable that goes into the tv is ALOT better of a picture then the ones going into the htpc and what displays on my tv on my htpc...

just to get a picture ive got a amd 3200, 1 gig ram, geforce 6600 256 meg vid card, mce 500 and windows xp mce..

any help would be great thx

Have you tried a direct connection to your HTPC without the splitter to see if that's actually the problem? I assume you're talking about cable, not sat or OTA.

If the low signal is a problem, you can buy a cable amp, but make sure it's "bidirectional". Most cable companies will even supply it for free if you have true Signals strength issues.

Please put your location in your profile, it'll often help us help you.

What do you mean by the picture is a lot better when you connect directly into the TV? Is the picture on the HTPC grainy, snowy, blurry?

What decoder are you using for MCE?

Jup

what i meant by the above was that i have my cable wire from outside split into 4, 2 into the htpc, 1 into the tv and 1 to my cable modem.. when i dont use my htpc for live tv but just the normal tv mode on my tv my picture is perfect.. but when i use my htpc for live or recorded tv the picture quality is not near as good. im using the happaugen(sp?) mce 500 tuner card and im in the vancouver region.. also if it helps my computer to tv setup is a monster dvi to hdmi cable on a sony 55" tv..
decoder software being used is the nvidia purevideo? the newest nvidia one

There will always be some degredation with the MPEG compression the PVR tuner card does.

There are probably some ways to choose the recording quality of the MCE500 card from Windows MCE. Have you checked in the recording options? Try selecting a better encoding quality.

For sure it won't be the same as the original signal but when I am watching live TV with my Hauppauge pvr250 it is really near the original at 480x480 and about 5mbps.