THEBaratusII wrote on 2023-05-26, 20:35:

Not sure if this is the right topic to bring this up in, but I am having some trouble outputting 720x400 resolution on my Gefen […]
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Not sure if this is the right topic to bring this up in, but I am having some trouble outputting 720x400 resolution on my Gefen EXT-VGA-2-DVISP.

It keeps outputting it as 640x350 instead of it's intended resolution, I've tried resetting it, switching PCs with different graphics cards and hooked it up with a monitor to no avail. I am wondering if it's anything firmware related?

I am not sure how familiar you are with that. 720x400 is basically meaning 320x200 - 720x400 is just how its handled by the monitors so to say. The correct way to handle it in terms of recording would be to capture or reduce it to 320x200 and then record it, and then scale from there. I am not familiar with the device you are using though, so I dont know which options you have.

My current setup now is this......been working on #SepTandy and #DOSCember videos quite a bit early this year.

USB Video Capture Device Converter (Composite/RCA/S-VIDEO)
https://www.amazon.com/Capture-Converter-Digi … e/dp/B0BKQCL71Z

Fosmon VGA to RCA Converter
https://www.amazon.com/Fosmon-HD1882-Composit … s/dp/B009OMYHJU

My main computers for video capture are the Tandy 1000A and the NanTan Notebook 9200D

That said, this setup has some pros and cons....

PROS
- It works with Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows now (so no more having a dedicated Windows recording computer)
- It has really good performance and does not drop it's frames very much (most of the time)
- Works with OBS Without Issue (comes up as USB 2.0 DV Capture for audio and video)
- It was really really cheap

CONS
- The Fosmon is made for 640x480, which is why I use the NanTan for the VGA 486 videos. My backup machine for this is the Versa M/75 with the 800x600 screen on it because for some reason the C&T 65545 card when in laptop mode or dual-scan mode gets rid of the letterboxing from the VGA port and properly orients the picture enough for video.
- The CGA color burst on the Tandy messes up my videos sometimes, making me lose colors, this is highly apparent in SimCity
- The Fosmon is really persnickety about color accuracy and color depth....I get better results sometimes with S-Video, and sometimes better results with Composite...so I switch between the two occasionally

THEBaratusII wrote on 2023-05-26, 20:35:

Not sure if this is the right topic to bring this up in, but I am having some trouble outputting 720x400 resolution on my Gefen […]
Show full quote

Not sure if this is the right topic to bring this up in, but I am having some trouble outputting 720x400 resolution on my Gefen EXT-VGA-2-DVISP.

It keeps outputting it as 640x350 instead of it's intended resolution, I've tried resetting it, switching PCs with different graphics cards and hooked it up with a monitor to no avail. I am wondering if it's anything firmware related?

640x350, 640x400 and 720x400 are all the same mode from the perspective of the scaler. They have the same total line count and the same horizontal sync timing, it cannot tell them apart once the signal has been output in the analog domain. The differences are that the 350 line mode has additional blank lines on either side of the vertical active area, and the 720 mode has a different dot clock from the other two (900 h total vs 800 h total)

maxtherabbit wrote on 2023-05-27, 00:17:

THEBaratusII wrote on 2023-05-26, 20:35:

Not sure if this is the right topic to bring this up in, but I am having some trouble outputting 720x400 resolution on my Gefen […]
Show full quote

Not sure if this is the right topic to bring this up in, but I am having some trouble outputting 720x400 resolution on my Gefen EXT-VGA-2-DVISP.

It keeps outputting it as 640x350 instead of it's intended resolution, I've tried resetting it, switching PCs with different graphics cards and hooked it up with a monitor to no avail. I am wondering if it's anything firmware related?

640x350, 640x400 and 720x400 are all the same mode from the perspective of the scaler. They have the same total line count and the same horizontal sync timing, it cannot tell them apart once the signal has been output in the analog domain. The differences are that the 350 line mode has additional blank lines on either side of the vertical active area, and the 720 mode has a different dot clock from the other two (900 h total vs 800 h total)

Thanks for letting me know that. Although I'm not sure why my Gefen doesn't scale it right for some reason. I tried researching for a possible solution to no avail. I did however find this video from another forum that shows the problem I am having. https://youtu.be/7lYlwOwcoN4?t=2558

Aaaand my extron 109xi just died. Well, not 100% dead, but the VGA connection got a lose contact and that lose contact is in the middle of the D-SUB connection. I tried my luck with opening and resoldering a few pins, but that only made it worse (It's a metal frame D-Sub Plug which you can open and close, but the lose contact seems to be at one of the middle row pins and it's impossible to reach without getting at anything else).
As it was a used product I guess it has no warranty (I contacted the vendor (occasion-shop.com), but no response yet).
But before I just reboy that thing...is there any alternative option I could test out? Having any similar feature as ADSP?
As the extron was still missing 1 pixel or so, maybe there is a better option.

Just as a reminder:
The Extron was mostly used to "fix" the 640x480 signal, which the datapath capture card cuts by a few pixels in the vertical (and the extron reduces what is being cut)

Kordanor wrote on 2023-05-30, 09:51:

Aaaand my extron 109xi just died. Well, not 100% dead, but the VGA connection got a lose contact and that lose contact is in the […]
Show full quote

Aaaand my extron 109xi just died. Well, not 100% dead, but the VGA connection got a lose contact and that lose contact is in the middle of the D-SUB connection. I tried my luck with opening and resoldering a few pins, but that only made it worse (It's a metal frame D-Sub Plug which you can open and close, but the lose contact seems to be at one of the middle row pins and it's impossible to reach without getting at anything else).
As it was a used product I guess it has no warranty (I contacted the vendor (occasion-shop.com), but no response yet).
But before I just reboy that thing...is there any alternative option I could test out? Having any similar feature as ADSP?
As the extron was still missing 1 pixel or so, maybe there is a better option.

Just as a reminder:
The Extron was mostly used to "fix" the 640x480 signal, which the datapath capture card cuts by a few pixels in the vertical (and the extron reduces what is being cut)

Desolder the VGA connector and replace it entirely?

maxtherabbit wrote on 2023-05-30, 14:47:

Kordanor wrote on 2023-05-30, 09:51:

Aaaand my extron 109xi just died. Well, not 100% dead, but the VGA connection got a lose contact and that lose contact is in the […]
Show full quote

Aaaand my extron 109xi just died. Well, not 100% dead, but the VGA connection got a lose contact and that lose contact is in the middle of the D-SUB connection. I tried my luck with opening and resoldering a few pins, but that only made it worse (It's a metal frame D-Sub Plug which you can open and close, but the lose contact seems to be at one of the middle row pins and it's impossible to reach without getting at anything else).
As it was a used product I guess it has no warranty (I contacted the vendor (occasion-shop.com), but no response yet).
But before I just reboy that thing...is there any alternative option I could test out? Having any similar feature as ADSP?
As the extron was still missing 1 pixel or so, maybe there is a better option.

Just as a reminder:
The Extron was mostly used to "fix" the 640x480 signal, which the datapath capture card cuts by a few pixels in the vertical (and the extron reduces what is being cut)

Desolder the VGA connector and replace it entirely?

Yeah, thats one option. But realistically speaking what is going to happen is, that I desolder it, destroy another vga cable in the process, solder it together, which takes several hours, then I will find out that it still doesnt work well, I try to fix the issue, takes some more hours. And lastly I give up and buy a new device after having wasted a full day working on it. Not sure its worth the time tbh.
I actually do like soldering, but not cable on cable, especially if they are that finnicky.

I'm testing the Datapath Vision-AVHD which is the more recent version of the Vision-RGB. It has the same issue in 640*480 under 75 Hz where it crops 2 or 3 lines at the bottom.
It changes resolution faster than a crt screen. There's a bit of lag but not much. I switched between 320*200 and 640*480. I filmed at 50 fps side by side a crt and the capture and I counted 5-6 frames of lag overall, but it changes resolution more than 0.5 seconds faster than a crt. In Little Big Adventure there's a glitch where you can go through walls by changing resolution. I guess you could play using the capture as a display instead of a crt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKVIo3SDago

chuky wrote on 2023-06-11, 21:05:

I'm testing the Datapath Vision-AVHD which is the more recent version of the Vision-RGB. It has the same issue in 640*480 under 75 Hz where it crops 2 or 3 lines at the bottom.
It changes resolution faster than a crt screen. There's a bit of lag but not much. I switched between 320*200 and 640*480. I filmed at 50 fps side by side a crt and the capture and I counted 5-6 frames of lag overall, but it changes resolution more than 0.5 seconds faster than a crt. In Little Big Adventure there's a glitch where you can go through walls by changing resolution. I guess you could play using the capture as a display instead of a crt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKVIo3SDago

Yeah, you can probably also reduce the crop effect by using the extron RGB ADSP feature like in the 109xi. It reduced the amount if missing lines a bit. Still not perfect. Ofc if you find a better solution, it would be cool if you could share it 😀
And yep, that thing is pretty fast

5-6 frames of lag sounds a bit high, that's 100 ms or so? I'd make sure the Datapath app has no frame buffering going on. It also does scaling and color conversion in hardware, but I'd imagine that'd be faster than 100 ms.

I am currently trying to get some settings on my voodoo card for datapath.
But for some resolutions I am just failing. I guess for each setup it is very different what settings you need as I needed different values when I used the extron, without the extron and with different cards.
But is there any "definite" numbers here?

Just for clarification: For VGA you need to set "horizontal size" and "phase" and I think only the 100% right combination results in a decent picture.
Soo for 800x600 I have a horizontal size of 1056 and a phase of 8. I guess the horizontal size is the same on all graphics card, but the phase is different (and the horizontal position)
But now I started up deus ex, which set on 640x480 is considered 656x494...and no matter what I set there...I get a bad picture on my capture device.
Any idea here? any way to calculate the ideal Horizontal Size?

vvbee wrote on 2023-06-13, 04:16:

5-6 frames of lag sounds a bit high, that's 100 ms or so? I'd make sure the Datapath app has no frame buffering going on. It also does scaling and color conversion in hardware, but I'd imagine that'd be faster than 100 ms.

Yeah, just a smidge over 83ms. I'll test on my machine sometime once the PSU for it is fixed.

Is it still advisable to scale up 640x480 content before uploading to youtube? What about padding, do people still pad out to 16:9? Is there any container/format that gets better results? I've seen some badly compressed 4:3 480p content on yt and just looking for some up to date advice. Thanks

Spark wrote on 2023-07-07, 18:35:

Is it still advisable to scale up 640x480 content before uploading to youtube? What about padding, do people still pad out to 16:9? Is there any container/format that gets better results? I've seen some badly compressed 4:3 480p content on yt and just looking for some up to date advice. Thanks

My way of doing it is to try pixel perfect scaling. 640x480 gets to 1280x960. And then just put that on a normal 1920x1080 canvas. If you use OBS for the scaling, use "Point".
It depends on the program what to use, and some do pixel perfect scaling with "None", but with OBS it gets mushy. So use "Point" instead.
If you use the Datapath and VCS then be aware of a bug, that the settings there are not applied correctly unless you adjust the presets. Also Datapath has an issue that a few pixels at the very right on 640x480 are cut off (thats an hardware issue).
If you capture via DVI thats not an issue ofc.

A sample video for 320x200 is this recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ggGNbJaVns
This one I scaled pixel perfect to 1280x1000 which also fixes the aspect ratio, as on CRT this resolution doesnt use quadratic pixels.
I can do a sample 640x480 recording if you like.

Regarding the best encoder and whatnot...I dont think there is a "great" solution. Some stuff is screwed up via youtube compression either way. Possibly it gets better with AV1, but havent tried that encoding much due to missing hardware.

If you use datapath also check out this thread: VCS - A capture utility for certain Datapath capture cards
VCS has a few issues, but its much better than the original software and I'd definitely recommend it.

Thanks for the tips! That scaled 300x200 footage comes out looking really nice even at 720p on my tablet.

Sorry if this is repetitive, but I need a way to capture DOS from VGA to USB at 320x200 resolutions. I don’t want to mess with installing chips in my computer. I want to use it for streaming and recording games. My current setup uses VGA to HDMI and HDMI to USB, which captures some DOS games like the need for speed, but not others, like DOOM. Can I get some actual product recommendations?

Kitty Trouble wrote on 2023-07-12, 13:26:

Sorry if this is repetitive, but I need a way to capture DOS from VGA to USB at 320x200 resolutions. I don’t want to mess with installing chips in my computer. I want to use it for streaming and recording games. My current setup uses VGA to HDMI and HDMI to USB, which captures some DOS games like the need for speed, but not others, like DOOM. Can I get some actual product recommendations?

For now there is no good solution. Most HDMI Capture cards can't cope with the 70Hz VGA Signal. That might change in the future as output is also more and more dynamic and beyond 60 Hz.

Best Option is a Datapath. This still involves tinkering, it needs to be installed, it costs 1000€ new (but you can get used ones for 100-200€) and requires custom software and work on that software.

But I see other people who have bought cheap converters on YouTube for example showing that they work for I.e. DOOM., there are no upscalers or converters at all that will work?

There are. They might just fail to switch or result in ugly compressions. But I dont think we really talked about the "bad" options here. You will probably find a couple of things on youtube.
I think Epiphan was a converter which can work in some instances. But If I remember correctly it had problems and it costs several hundred bucks. LGR also mentioned it in his video regarding captures.

I’m willing to deal with a quality loss since my primary goal is to use it for speedrunning, as long as it can capture the gameplay I’m fine with any solution. But my current solution is black screen for the games I want.