When I first built this media centre I was very enthusiastic about the Windows7 beta & release candidates, and I ran the input from standard Sky decoder on s-video and the output through an nvidia GS-8400 s-video output because I was using a legacy standard definition CRT television. I've since bought a genuine copy of Windows7 64-bit, fresh install.

To be honest, when I compared the picture quality through the media centre with direct composite output from the Sky decoder, the colour was a bit smeared and I could see individual picture frames on fast action (while the Sky output was smooth).

In the weekend I bought a new LG monitor with HDMI, DVI and VGA inputs, native 1900 x 1080. When I tested the HDMI interface on Freeview terrestrial channels 1, 2 and 3, the picture frames stuttered to the point of being unwatchable. My expectation was that I would finally be watching Freeview in High Definition. The task manager didn't show excessive processor, probably 30-40% over the 2 cores. 

What kind of picture quality are you seeing from your media centre, compared to the results from dedicated boxes such as MySkyHDi, Freeview boxes and DVD/Bluray players? Particularly across HDMI.

My expectation was high, I was thinking the media centre should be able to do every function a dedicated box could do and more, but this HDMI picture quality has hugely disappointed me.