Recording games from PC to PC and to VCR

[Fantasma]

Hi guys,

I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice or share your experience with me regarding my latest experiment.

I have been trying to capture the activity of my desktop in the best possible quality in order to create tutorials, presentations and movies that then would be burned to CD-R and DVD+R media, so far I have been able to achieve very good quality using an ASUS Radeon 9200 video card by enabling the TV Out function of the card and using an S-Video cable to connect it to my TV Tuner card, which allow my to record in AVI or mpeg to a second hard disk, all of this in the same computer ( I call this setup retro-feeding ). I use an S-Video cable that is plugged to my TV card video out and the end to the TV Tuner.

Normal activities such as opening applications and not very demanding system tasks are recorded just fine, but all hell breaks loose when I try to record a game such as Unreal Tournament 2004, it is just impossible to get any decent movie or the system just crashes.

Now, I can also record to my VCR using a Composite cable while playing UT2K4 and the system, of course, works fine, but the quality is terribly low and even worse when I try to author a VCD or SVCD. Because recording from my PC to VCR does not cause any system workload I feel this is the best way to record games.

I would love to hear from you any thoughts or recommendations to get better picture.

Thanks for your time.

[jggimi]

A second PC? A better VCR? A DVD recorder?

Analog capture with typical PCI cards takes significant PC resources, and you cannot usually use the same PC to do anything else at the same time. If you search Doom9's forum, you will also find discussion of screen grabbing tools for game capture that eliminate your analog loopback, but unfortunately, suffer from the exact same sort of resource contention.

[Fantasma]

Hi,

My TV Tuner/Capture card comes with an onboard mpeg encoder chip, CPU utilization is zero, however, I guess the data transfer is the bottle neck in this case.

I have already considered the second PC idea, but no money to burn.

Thanks for your suggestion.

[zilog jones]

I don't think you'll be able to anything like that with one PC with decent results as jggimi said. There's a few options I can think of:

- Another PC: even if you just borrow one off a friend or something. A laptop may be easier, but it'll either need decent graphics or you'll have to buy a USB/firewire capture device (depending on what way round you're doing things). It doesn't need to be a particularly good PC or anything - my PIII 933MHz can capture full resolution AVI no problems.
- A better VCR: Know anyone with a S-VHS VCR or anything? Maybe you could get one cheap? Though the quality still won't be *great*, it's still about twice as good as normal VHS. Of course
- A camcorder: A lot of newer miniDV camcorders have analogue (s-video) inputs.

You may also want to try FRAPS or some other program for capturing, but I don't like them.

[fellaw]

For common GUI tasks there are many tools which can create AVIs, e.g. SnagIt (http://www.techsmith.com)(Shareware). Just do a quick search (http://www.google.com/search?q=screen+capture+avi) on google and you'll find them.

For capturing DirectX and OpenGL, Fraps (http://www.fraps.com) is a very good software, though it's not for free if you want to capture unlimited length and without water marks.

Both methods give much better quality than your method and don't use that much performance.

However you should consider using less cpu intensive codecs for capturing this way, Huffyuv, MJPEG or uncompressed.

[ReTox]

If your game supports demo-recording use it. Using Fraps to record while you play is not recommended, especially if you wish to use equal to, or better than, DVD resolutions. Fraps will output every frame it can which will slow your DX rendering down to a point that is unplayable. With the demo you just play it and record, let the engine drop its frame rate as you don't need to do anything but let Fraps grab the data.

Fraps also saves the data uncompressed so you will need HUGE free space to work with them. Mine are routinely GBs in size. Good thing is the quality, its perfect!

[Harborside1]

I am trying to record Thief PC Game from one pc to another.

I am able to record the game in progress,

What I am having trouble with is the the video quality looks
Poor versus what I see in the actual game.

I am outputting from the game pc via s-video to the
second pc capture card.

:confused:

Game pc using ATI All In Wonder 128 rage II chip type under
windows 2000 pro.

Capture pc has a ATI All In Wonder Radeon 9600.

I am using Virtualdub on the above pc to capture the video
at 720x480 and then cropping afterwords.

I am using YUY2 with no video compression.


The video seems blurry.

I am using Tmpgenc xpress 3.0 to edit the single large capture avi.

Is there any way to improve on the video quality?

Or is it the nature of ATI AIW to have poor quality tv out ?

[*.mp4 guy]

I would try a better capture program, I've had bad experiences with Vdub and capturing try VirtualVCR it works very well for me. S-video should give quality similar to that of most dvd's from what I have heard, so it definately wont look as good as on the other pc.

[communist]

Alternatively to FRAPS you can try out Taksi:
http://taksi.sourceforge.net/

[mic]

A few years back when video out on graphics cards or laptops wasn't available, let alone common, scan convertors were the only option. Still work well, still can buy them new (for a fraction of the orig cost), and could probably find a ton of them used.

For those who've never seen one, it's simply a small box with a video cable to hook to your PC or laptop, and a second cable to go to your PC monitor. It has at least s-vid and rca video out. You might have a remote control, and usually there are controls for overscan, centering and such. The video quality can be excellant, better then most video cards with a TV out, and most I think will take the full hi-res display from your PC monitor and resize it rather then just show a portion of your screen.

Most popular for presentations, they've been used in the past (when there weren't so many alternatives) for lower end pro and semi-pro video and animation work -- they're that good.

[dr.pauli]

I've used the 2 PC solution via SVideo cabling. It works great, except for one thing: The actual game machine is running high-rez, like 1280X1024. The capture is, at maximum, 720X480. It defaults to center screen, but by moving the mouse on the Game machine, you can see other areas. However, the ultimate desire is to capture Full Screen.

Are there any capture programs that will capture at that high a resolution utilizing a standard capture card, like an ATI9800?

BTW - I can attest to the problem with using FRAPS. The Game machine is running at 70 frames without FRAPS, but drops to 5 frames when FRAPS is running! It's running on a AMD64/3200+ under XP-Pro, with 1GB RAM, and a MSI NX6800GTX-T2D256E (I think that's the one, it's a $400+ PCI Express 256MB/DDR3 wiz-bang card, HE does games, not me!).

Anybody have any suggestions? He is NOT willing to run the games at a lower resolution, unfortuately. Thanks for any help/suggestions.

[mic]

@dr.pauli

A scan convertor will output the full (PC monitor) screen, converting it to the format a vcr,dv, or dvd deck would record, & this includes at higher resolutions on the PC monitor. Likewise the current ATI AIW series will convert what's on the orig. monitor to fill a TV screen. But converting a TV-type signal is going to apply TV frame size standards.

If the goal (and I'm not sure I'm reading your post correctly), is to capture a 1280 screen at 1280 width, then one possibility might be to look into HDTV gear (HDTV in/out on AIWs for example) with 2 PCs. Screen capture on the orig. PC might work, be much less of a CPU drain, if you used a hardware compression card.

"Are there any capture programs that will capture at that high a resolution"

Windows media encoder for one can handle the higher resolution (you don't have to use high compression if you can handle the data rate), & I'm sure there are others. Biggest thing as I see it is getting away from TV standards if you're after 1280 frame widths.