I have one of the old hauppauge cards without hardware mpeg encoding - the one with an FM radio aswell (WinTV-radio I think it's called)
Most WinTV PCI cards are similar.
I am running the latest drivers from hauppauge (WDM driver version wdm335_21125.exe)
compared with other software I am getting quite poor quality in MC - the brightness, contrast and colour is just wrong (no matter how long I spend sliding them sliders).
Try setting the preview video size. Go to TV Options dialog window, click "Advanced Properties" tab. Double-click "Video Preview Pin..." item in the list box, and experiment with Color Space (YUY2, RGB etc) and set size to 640 x 240 or 640 x 480. Beware however, if you set the size to 640 x 480, you will have problem recording. During recording you can only use 640 x 240 or lower for preview.
To get back to the initial issue, I am still experiencing the picture inverting when trying to use a deinterlace filter - is it possible I am trying to deinterlace a picture which is already deinterlaced?
Try different color space setting on preview pin (see above) .
Is it true that with the PVR 250 there is always a 2 second delay between changing channel on an external box (such as a satelite decoder) and seeing the change on screen.
Does anyone have plans to develop a TV guide plugin (probably using xmlTV) for MC thus enabling PVR (Personal Video Recorder) features?
I can not answer either of these questions. PVR250/350 are not supported in MC at this time, because they are digital, and use hardware encoding (I believe).