I thought the only ATI cards with VIVO were the ones explicitly marketed as All-in-Wonder.

Some cards have S-Video ports on them, but particularly in the case of video-in there will probably be a somewhat more specialized connector. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Video#Non-4-pin_variants . I would direct you to Monoprice, but it looks like they only have the 7-pin adapters.

Keep in mind that a USB video capture device will only run you about $20 nowadays.

AFAIK VIVO support depends on some ATi "Theater" chip and at least the X1950 reference design is supposed to have that. On the other hand GF8/9 still have Mini-DIN ports on them, but those are said to be S-Video/Component out only.

I've seen these cheap capture devices. My issue with them is that most of them seem to only claim to support Win7/8 while I want to run it on XP. But oh well, for that price may as well give it a try...

d1stortion wrote:

I've seen these cheap capture devices. My issue with them is that most of them seem to only claim to support Win7/8 while I want to run it on XP.

Huh. I'd heard the opposite, namely that the 64-bit driver support is lacking.

The regular X1950 Pro definitely does not support video input. Though now that I think about it, there may have also been a version with VIVO, which does have that capability.

The best cheap option, IMO, is the old Hauppauge PVR-250/PVR-350. They can be had for $10-15 on eBay, support XP (as well as 2000 and 98SE), and they do MPEG-2 compression in hardware, which is a very good thing if you're short on processing power or hard drive space. The WinTV software isn't great, but it does the job, and it's still far better than the shit ATi uses. Note that there is also a PVR-150 which is more common and slightly newer, but I don't recommend those... they have some unsolvable issues with video quality, and the sound can be troublesome too.

I have a ATi Theater 650 Pro card. It is OK but they force an auto gain on you that constantly tweaks contrast. I have never found a way to disable it. This is not ideal for capturing games, especially if they go from very dark to bright often... Their video cards with the lower end Theater chips may do the same.

For software, I usually capture with Virtualdub and use HuffYUV. Later I make a final encode with x264vfw.

VirtualDub can indeed record from capture cards directly, and I'm sure other programs can as well. Last time I looked I could not do better than VirtualVCR-Matroska ; as Matroska does not require a constant frame rate, it is relatively impervious to frameskipping/desynchronizing issues.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

The best cheap option, IMO, is the old Hauppauge PVR-250/PVR-350. They can be had for $10-15 on eBay, support XP (as well as 2000 and 98SE), and they do MPEG-2 compression in hardware, which is a very good thing if you're short on processing power or hard drive space. The WinTV software isn't great, but it does the job, and it's still far better than the shit ATi uses. Note that there is also a PVR-150 which is more common and slightly newer, but I don't recommend those... they have some unsolvable issues with video quality, and the sound can be troublesome too.

To be clear, there's no 64-bit or Windows 7 support for those, is there?

To be clear, there's no 64-bit or Windows 7 support for those, is there?

No, they were obsolete long before Win7 came around. For SD capture, I don't know of any really good cards (at least, with a reasonable price tag) that support 64-bit. With these things, newer does not mean better. Everything now focuses on digital tuners and/or HD capture, with composite/SVideo tending to be more of an afterthought... and it shows in the quality of the captures.

Actually, I think the best quality option would be one of the old AGP AIW cards with the Theater 200 chip. The capture quality on those things can compete with a lot of pro-class cards. Capture into lossless AVI using your codec of choice ( HuffYUV or Lagarith being the most popular), and then edit and re-encode to whatever format you want from there.

But for most purposes, that's overkill. I would consider the Hauppauge PVR cards to be second best... you don't get the option of lossless capture, but most people are just going to be transferring to DVD or posting on Youtube anyway, so MPEG-2 is fine. And, unlike the old AIW cards, you're not limited to using a system with AGP.

The recording PC in question would be a 4.1 GHz Phenom II X4. Does that still fall under "short on processing power", or was that remark more targeted towards retro systems?

I'm definitely interested in getting at least 1080p youtube "quality"; of course the input would be LD/SD. Is lossless recording possible with these USB dongles?

You'll have no problem capturing video with a Phenom II. But you need to remember not to try to do real-time x264 or xvid/divx or something like that. It's too demanding and you will drop frames. During capture you use something like HuffYUV or Lagarith which are lossless compressions and trivial for a modern CPU. They produce files that are still huge but not as large as uncompressed video. You should also use uncompressed PCM audio instead of trying real-time MP3 or similar.

The main concern if you do >480p is the potential to overwhelm a HDD's sustained write speed. But almost any recent drive should be fine as long as you use HuffYUV or Lagarith to keep the data rate from being insane.

A USB capture device most certainly should be able to work with any compression you desire. They should provide a standard YV12 stream to work with in whichever program you end up capturing with.

Jorpho wrote:

To be clear, there's no 64-bit or Windows 7 support for those, is there?

Yes there is. I'm using my PVR150 on Windows 7 64bit. Drivers were released a year ago I believe.

Hmm, so if I understand it correctly, the step of upscaling to pillarboxed 720p/1080p would be done within the final h.264 encoding?

S-Video as in capturing analog TV recordings or game play footage? If its VHS tapes and such, pull a P4 out of the mothballs with an AGP slot and find an AGP era All-in-Wonder card like the 9600 or 9800 and install XP on the machine. Its the best for analog capture. No AGC to worry about, and its the best quality.

If you are doing game play footage from another machine or classic consoles, don't even bother with S-Video. VGA/HD capture cards are cheap these days.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16815158317

Its the same as the Micomsoft SC-500N1.

http://www.videogameperfection.com/av-gear/st … re-card-review/
http://www.videogameperfection.com/av-gear/st … etting-started/
http://www.videogameperfection.com/av-gear/st … pture-software/
http://www.videogameperfection.com/av-gear/st … decs-in-amarec/

Also, do not upscale your 640x480 captures. Upload them as is or jack up the output computer's video output to 720/1080p.

If we're talking youtube upscaling is a must unfortunately. Sub-720p material gets badly compressed. See here.

Also, I'm aware that VGA is superior in every way, but $10 for a S-Video dongle is a lot less than $100 for that card. Its use would be limited to low-res stuff on PC and consoles, but the quality wouldn't be that much worse than S-Video on a capture card I guess?

d1stortion wrote:

Also, I'm aware that VGA is superior, but $10 for a S-Video dongle is a lot less than $100 for that card. Its use would be limited to low-res stuff on PC and consoles, but the quality wouldn't be that much worse than S-Video on a capture card I guess?

See this clip of Doom captured with VGA/HDMI capture card and then compare it against s-video from maur1wulf1977 Youtube video. Difference only increases with higher resolutions. Remember you need to watch with 720p HD quality on Youtube to really notice the differences. My original file is available here

Here is another example with Tomb Raider at 320x240:
S-video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj7OXXkY788
VGA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LEb9WDDZtA (original quality available)

Notice how much clear the colors are on VGA. VGA is also ALOT better for Windows capturing. See Gona's nice test video on Youtube (watch in original quality).

Well, I never doubted that VGA would beat some PAL/NTSC signal? 😉 there is a visible difference, mainly with reds. They look a bit washed out on S-Video. Other than that I think it looks acceptable for the price though.

For me the main usage would be to capture game consoles. My BVM monitor conveniently has a S-Video out, so I wouldn't need any fancy splitters or anything.

SVideo is the best you can do for some consoles anyway. But yeah Svideo doesn't hold a candle to VGA/RGB.

Actually I have been considering buying an RGB modded N64....

I've been using consoles with composite my whole life. S-Video really is such a huge step forward in quality to be honest. Even if it does bring out the dithering with PSX, N64 etc. I can't see myself going back to composite. Now I hope that when I get some RGB/component setups I'll be just as blown away, even though I know that likely won't be the case 🤣

The problem with S-Video is that it wasn't very popular in Europe. For example, PAL Gamecubes don't even offer it. Now I see Americans rave about SCART due to it being RGB capable but that connection has its set of issues too, those being its bad design which is bound to pull on the connector, causing it to become loose over time, and lack of seperate audio cables...

d1stortion wrote:

I've seen these cheap capture devices. My issue with them is that most of them seem to only claim to support Win7/8 while I want to run it on XP. But oh well, for that price may as well give it a try...

I found the opposite!

Everything works with XP but most don't specify if they work with W7/8 64 bit 😀

I use a VGA to S-Video converter box. It works with any game I tried whereas the built-in S-Video out (Geforce for example or Radeon) can have issues with certain games.

Also the converter box has a pass through VGA so I can keep playing on my monitor while capturing in the same time.

Biggest feature is the price. S-Video capturing is CHEAP and very robust.

For best quality VGA capture is the way to go but it's very expensive. And depending on what you want to do (play-through) DOSBox might be better.

I do my PowerVR videos through S-Video capture on a WinTV HVR-1250 w/ VirtualDub in Windows 7 x64 and I try to go for 0 flicker reduction and 720x480 when possible. Dealing with interlacing is annoying although Yadif can work that out in most cases.