Hello John,

Wednesday, June 06, 2001, 5:21:43 PM, you wrote:

JS> I am looking into options for capturing the action from within a computer
JS> game and using this to make a movie to be played back on the computer
JS> (independent of having the game installed).

JS> Using a program such as Camtasia or HyperCam to capture the onscreen
JS> activity while playing the game.

Won't work because most of the games tax the CPU, and MPEG encoding
on-the-fly, 640x480x25fps (in best case...) is some serious number
crunching. And if you write uncompressed your hard drive (if it is
alone on the system) won't handle the load - at 23 Mbytes/sec of
sustained throughput, you'll need a RAID array or a SCSI to reliably
store it all.

It might just work if you get a program smart enough to resize the
video down (say 320x240) and/or work in realtime so it will have
enough time to compress (uncompressed 320x240 stream is about 4
Mbytes/sec, so a fast IDE will do fine here if left alone, i.e. game
is run from another HD), and still the game will probably slow down.

JS> Using a video out connection on a video card and a VCR.  The advantage is
JS> that you can record a lot of game time this way.

Reasonable if you want the final AVI to be up to 320x240 resolution.
Otherwise, VHS quality will be a limiting factor. I'd go this way if I
wanted to capture some games -- cheap and the quality is acceptable,
especiallly if you plan to put the files on the Internet where they
should be small anyway.

JS> A similiar approach would be to use two computers and hook the TV-out of one
JS> computer directly up to the video capture card of another.

A fast computer (and I mean fast, something like 1 GHz with an
7200 rpm Ultra-100 drive) can capture and compress nicely even with a
standard TV board (but make sure you have several GBytes of free space
first). Slower ones will fare worse - you won't get more than 400x300
on anything below 500 MHz on standard TV card.

If you decide to go this way, do some reading. There are a lot of
resources on the Net (on this topic I can only point to the Russian ones, but
the Google is there for you) for video capture, and there are a lot of
things you need to know before recording.

JS> The above options I know will work, and any suggestions or information about
JS> software and hardware related to the above would be appreciated.

Hardware: almost any TV card will do, some software usually goes with
the card and some is free, like Virtual Dub.

JS> First, is there such a thing as a video capture card that would accept the
JS> output directly off another computer's video card's monitor output?

Never saw one. That doesn't mean there are none, of course.

JS> In other words, could one hook up the DV output of a video card
JS> (which should go to a flat panel monitor) to a firewire port on
JS> another computer and capture it to the hard drive in some fashion?

Probably not. And computers, as a rule (Macs excluded)
don't have Firewire ports installed "by default", so you'd have to buy
an expansion card to have them...

Yours,

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