Best way to capture 288p50 or 240p59.94 video signal emitted by an NES for DVD-Video?

[kurkosdr]

Long story short, old game consoles like the NES emit a weird video signal that, instead of being field pairs of a top field and a bottom field, is only bottom fields or only top fields (for the full long story, see here (https://www.hdretrovision.com/240p)). In practice, this forces a CRT TV to scan like a 288p progressive monitor at 50Hz (for PAL) or like a 240p progressive monitor at 59.94Hz (for NTSC).

My question is: How do I capture such a video so I can later put it on a DVD with minimal loss, considering DVD-Video doesn't support 50p or 59.94p framerates?

The best I've come up with so far is to capture normally and upscale to 576p or 480p and use a 25p or 29.97 framerate, but this would lose half the temporal resolution (motion quality). Has anyone come up with something better?

PS: I know Blu-ray can do 720p50 and 720p59.94, but I want DVD-Video.

[DJ Bobo]

This is news to me.
I think, they are just trying to sell their equipment.
Just use the normal composite cable attached to a PVR that has the good old composite inputs (yellow/white/red) and record as 480i or 576i. This will have the full spatial AND temporal information + the blurring from the composite connection that masks all the imperfections of 8-bit graphics.
Mind you, the original NES output composite video only! Anything else is a 3rd party mod! Not a single TV could accept native 240p in the 80s!

The Hauppauge USB-Live2 is the only analog PVR I know of that records directly in MPEG-2, saving the step of re-encoding the captured video for DVD delivery.

[kurkosdr]

This is news to me.
I think, they are just trying to sell their equipment.
Just use the normal composite cable attached to a PVR that has the good old composite inputs (yellow/white/red) and record as 480i or 576i. This will have the full spatial AND temporal information + the blurring from the composite connection that masks all the imperfections of 8-bit graphics.
Mind you, the original NES output composite video only! Anything else is a 3rd party mod! Not a single TV could accept native 240p in the 80s!

The Hauppauge USB-Live2 is the only analog PVR I know of that records directly in MPEG-2, saving the step of re-encoding the captured video for DVD delivery.

"Double-strike" was a well-known technique back then, it's the reason the output of old videogame consoles has slightly visible scan lines when viewed on a CRT (while normal TV broadcasts don't).

https://junkerhq.net/xrgb/index.php/240p_video

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13936224

The way old videogame consoles do this is by omitting the special half-line that offsets the top and bottom field from each other (ever wondered why all interlaced video has an odd number of total lines? 405-line, 525-line, 625-line, 819-line, 1125 line... which field gets the extra line? The top or the bottom? The answer is neither, it's the special half-line that makes interlace happen)

The problem is that most capture equipment doesn't handle this "double-strike" hack on top of interlaced well. Most capture equipment will capture 25p/29.97p, basically only every other field, and will fill the "missing" field with black lines, leading to a loss of temporal resolution.

That's why I am looking for a way to capture such a signal properly.

[DJ Bobo]

Most capture equipment will capture 25p/29.97p, basically only every other field, and will fill the "missing" field with black lines, leading to a loss of temporal resolution.
Most SD analog capture equipment can't record progressive at all, as this is not part of the composite or S-Video standard.
Composite and S-Video are ALWAYS interlaced.
You can tell that there is no missing temporal information by using the Bob filter in a game like Super Mario Bros. You will see that every field has different content, so you're definitely getting the full 60 temporal shots in your composite recording.

Those discussions you linked are about capturing component video, which was not even possible in the NES era! As said, these are modern 3rd party mods. There never was an official component cable for the NES!