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, +=-. | Max Timchenko [MaxVT] | [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask] | FAX (413)431-4014 ICQ 2386792 | | Freelance website and graphics designer | Visit my site : http://maxwd.hypermart.net | | Editor - Graphics artist | NOSPIN group +=-. The NOSPIN Group provides a monthly newsletter with great tips, information and ideas: NOSPIN-L, The NOSPIN Magazine Visit our web site to signup: http://freepctech.com