This is my setting for D-SUB capture. Resolution doesn't matter as it will change it automatically anway!

And for DVI I use this:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

With S-Video, hands down the best quality capture is straight off video cards with S-Video out. Don't use splitters and not even […]
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ReeseRiverson wrote:

I got a VGA to S-VIDEO converter, and converted S-VIDEO to Component through my Pioneer AV Receiver to my capture device, and for grins and giggles, tried Rayman 2 on my 486DX4. 🤣

With S-Video, hands down the best quality capture is straight off video cards with S-Video out. Don't use splitters and not even clone mode. Just work on the preview image of the capture software.

But I wonder, you do have an AVerMedia now as well or do you send it back?

Just saw your post 🤣

When I boot up on my 386 I never get an image. The card doesn't sync at all on most cards. Some machines / cards output a different DOS font and they sync. Like on my Tualatin system.

So what I do is run something in 640 x 480 resolution. You get an image and then when you quit the image is still there, but looks a bit squished. You will need to crop it in your Video editor.

I use Recentral for recording!

Well the only video card I have with an S-Video out would be my ATI LT Rage Pro PCI card I have in the Pentium Pro system.

YEah, I still have my AverMedia.

Well, I tried that, like you suggested, or at least 800 x 600 to DOS and I get this:

VGA Capture Thread

Hmm that's odd.

Is this with the same video card / computer?

Voodoo 3DFX should also come up straight away.

It was another machine, when I had the Voodoo 3DFX logo act up.

However it was any machine with DOS, that gets that odd issue. 🙁

Same case if I were to try to run Descent.

Hmm that's no good. But it does capture 640 x 480 fine, right? But as soon as you quit, or run a 320 x 200 game from within Windows it loses the signal?

Yeah, does fine on 640 x 480, but yeah upon exiting windows, it loses signal or just shows a garbled image.

This is why I have the VGA to S-Video converter in place like I did, to rule out the issue.

Try a game like Quake at 640x480 or t 320x240 then exit

Exiting from Windows is not guaranteed to work on all cards. From my memory the ATI cards are a bit picky.

What about S3 Virge / Trio64 cards?

Here is a quick capture of my Tualeron Windows 98 system running 3Dmark 2001.

S-Video TV-out from an Asus v9950 Geforce FX 5900 Ultra.
Captured using S-Video in with an Asus v8200 Geforce 3 Deluxe*.

VirtualDub was used as captureing software.
First captured as MJPEG then deinterlaced and recoded as H.264*.
Video resolution is standard PAL 720*576.

The file host looks a bit shady but it works, I tested it my self to be sure.
The file of "unknown size" is 102 mb.
http://www.filedropper.com/3dmark

*This video was made without using any new boring non retro hardware! 😁
*Do not try to watch this video using retro hardware! 😉

Very nice! Great quality!

So many cards have S-Video out so capturing S-Video is great without having to spend a lot on capture devices.

Something I do miss about the S-Video capturing I used previously is the simplicity and robustness. It just works, no matter the resolution, refresh rate, video card, it just works.

I did not think it would work as well as it does.

The software that came with the Asus Geforce 3 card was not perfect...
"Asus Digital VCR" works great except it can only capture with Asus crappy MPEG2 codec or their ASV2 codec which is almost as bad.

VirtualDub worked great with the MJPEG codec in the ffdshow package.
VirtualDub had no problems at all with dumping a 720*576 50 FPS MJPEG stream to the disk using a Nforce3 Athlon 64 system.

There is nothing wrong with MPEG2. The first BR movies used MPEG2 😀

The quality is good and it's very easy on the capture computer.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

@ Vetz Haven't god a Voodoo 3 but might get one! Anything to look out for? Different versions / clocks / memory?

Most Voodoo3 cards were manufactured by STB (owned by 3Dfx then) so there are not that many models.
The German Wikipedia article on Voodoo3 sums it up quite nicely:

Voodoo 3 2000

RAM: 16 MB
Speichertakt: 143 MHz
RAMDAC: 300 MHz
Chiptakt: 143 MHz
Interface: PCI oder AGP

Voodoo 3 3000

RAM: 16 MB
Speichertakt: 166 MHz
RAMDAC: 350 MHz
Chiptakt: 166 MHz
Besonderheiten: TV-Out in Verbindung mit AGP
Interface: PCI oder AGP2X

Voodoo 3 3500TV

RAM: 16 MB
Speichertakt: 183 MHz
RAMDAC: 350 MHz
Chiptakt: 183 MHz
Besonderheiten: TV-Tuner, TV-Out, S-Video und Audio-Ein-/Ausgänge
Interface: PCI oder AGP

The Vogons Wiki article on 3dfx contradicts and says that the 3500 is only available for AGP, though.

If you don't want to go for higher 3D performance than the version doesn't matter too much.
It's your decision if you want to have TV-Out. TV-Tuner is probably useless today.
(I remember some post here which said there was a Compaq OEM version which had the clocks of a 3500 but no TV-Tuner.)
PCI or AGP is a matter of convenience, AGP are usually cheaper to get, the speed difference is negligible.
You might want to upgrade cooling, especially for the higher clocked versions.

I have two cards, an AGP Voodoo 3 3000 and a PCI Voodoo 3 2000. Both works well for capture.

As mentioned by the previous poster, most cards were made by STB, so there are not much difference.

idspispopd wrote:

(I remember some post here which said there was a Compaq OEM version which had the clocks of a 3500 but no TV-Tuner.)

The Compaq part number was 147908-001 but it looks like the guy selling all of the NOS cards is out of them. There's currently someone else selling a bunch of used ones. Anyway, it's a 3500 without the tuner, and it runs hot as hell...definitely want to face a fan toward it if you go that route.

idspispopd wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

@ Vetz Haven't god a Voodoo 3 but might get one! Anything to look out for? Different versions / clocks / memory?

Most Voodoo3 cards were manufactured by STB (owned by 3Dfx then) so there are not that many models.
The German Wikipedia article on Voodoo3 sums it up quite nicely:

Cool!

Well had a look on eBay Australia, not much available. I will keep an eye out for any bargains 😀

Yeah, there are only 2 3dfx cards on eBay Australia at the moment, one Voodoo5 5500 and one Voodoo2. (The video card category on ebay.de has about 10 times as many items as ebay.com.au.)
The price for the Voodoo5 (AU $100) is actually ok, but I understand that you are not looking for maximum GLiDE performance.

idspispopd wrote:

Most Voodoo3 cards were manufactured by STB (owned by 3Dfx then) so there are not that many models. The German Wikipedia article […]
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Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

@ Vetz Haven't god a Voodoo 3 but might get one! Anything to look out for? Different versions / clocks / memory?

Most Voodoo3 cards were manufactured by STB (owned by 3Dfx then) so there are not that many models.
The German Wikipedia article on Voodoo3 sums it up quite nicely:

[...]

The Vogons Wiki article on 3dfx contradicts and says that the 3500 is only available for AGP, though.

[...]

There are more Voodoo3 models than just those and the V3 3500 (183MHz card) was only available with AGP. Not counting the Velocity models, these are the V3's that were available;

Gateway Voodoo3 1000 143MHz 8MiB AGP
Compaq Voodoo3 1000 125MHz 16MiB AGP
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 143MHz 16MiB PCI/AGP
3dfx Voodoo3 3000 166MHz 16MiB PCI/AGP
3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TVsi 166MHz 16MiB AGP TV Tuner
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV 183MHz 16MiB AGP
3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV 183MHz 16MiB AGP TV Tuner
3dfx/Falcon Northwest Voodoo3 3500 TV SE 200MHz 16MiB AGP TV Tuner (very difficult to find)

There were other Voodoo3's from other brands with their own designs and lastly, rebranded 3dfx Voodoo3's but they all had the same specs as their 3dfx counterparts.

Another capture on a 3DFX Voodoo (Diamond 3D Monster).

Also cuts off parts of the image. Quite annoying. I believe the AVermedia is set on certain image position.

Great game BTW. Really enjoyed playing it.

Descent 2 on a Celeron 300 with 3DFX Voodoo

Shot my second part of the "MS-DOS / Windows 95 Hybrid Gaming PC" video and learnt the hard way that when AVerMedia starts a new video file (this happens when you change resolutions, or reboot), the commentary recording into a separate MP3 simply stops!

It just records commentary for the first video file, then stops 😒

So I had a choice of re-shooting the whole thing or doing a post-video voice over. I remembered buying this VGA scaler ages ago. It's a VGA-in > VGA-out box and takes any VGA signal and outputs it in a specific resolution. So I tried that and it worked really well. No more resizing, no more having to splice together 20 little video files. It's still missing parts of the image, no idea why considering it has auto-sync just like a monitor, but it allowed me to shoot the entire video in one file, with the commentary in a MP3 file 😀

Now I have a fairly effortless workflow going, not just for DVI, but also for VGA capturing 😀

So instead of focusing on capture devices, maybe looking at VGA scaler is the way to go? I think I got this one from eBay, but I can't remember. It wasn't super cheap, but cheap enough for me to take a punt. Happy I finally have a use for it.

One thing I noticed, even the VGA to S-Video converter cuts off the top and right side on the 3DFX Voodoo. So far I haven't been able to capture the full image at all.

I'll post the result here soon.