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Ever since getting an ATI All In Wonder 128 years ago, I've been capturing myself playing console games like Xbox or GameCube on my computer and then compressing it down to send to people. I would do this by plugging the yellow RCA (video) into the purple dongle that went into the AIW 128 and then the red and white RCA (audio) into a Y-connector that went into my sound card. Then I would use the TV feature of ATI's Multimedia Center and play on the screen. There didn't seem to be any lag whatsoever. It was exactly like it would be if I had it plugged into a TV. I would then record myself playing uncompressed in both video and audio, and then use Virtual Dub to compress it in DivX and get a very decent balance of quality and size.
After the graphics side of the AIW 128 started to show it's age, I decided later on that I would buy a seperate card for graphics, and a seperate card for the "All in Wonder" features such as capturing. That way, I would not be stuck having to upgrade both in case of an upgrade. Quite a few weeks back, I bought an ATI TV Wonder Elite, the most expensive and high end TV Tuner money could buy at the time, at Best Buy thinking it would be the exact same as any All In Wonder card. I was unfortunately wrong. First of all, the software that ships with it is inexcusably bad. It offers almost no customizability or advanced options (can't even choose which codec to use or bitrate), it crashes frequently and it very slow and sluggish. The proprietary MPEG-2 codec it uses on the "Good" setting lands up with a file that is 35MB/min, which is definately not net-friendly to say the least. When I finally was able to use it for about 5 minutes and actually get to the video capturing part, any input I made on the controller would take 1-2 seconds to register on the screen! Any lag at all while trying to play a game in real time is unacceptable! Especially in a First Person Shooter like Halo or something.
Some quick specs about the current system I am running. ASUS A8V for a MoBo running an AMD 3500+ 64 Bit Processer with 1GB of Kingston RAM. XP Pro as the O/S. ATI Radeon X800 Pro for the graphics card and ... sigh... the ATI TV Wonder Elite running PCI.
So then I tried to see if maybe I could use the TV feature of ATI's Multimedia Center. But when I opened up the MMC, the TV tab was no longer there! In it's place was some sort of Easyshare TV tab, But when I tried to run that, it would crash everytime and wouldn't even load. So then I tried some third party software such as VirtualVCR, DScaler, AVI_IO, etc to try and get some better results. DScaler crashed and the other two, while having slightly better response times of about 1/2 a second, had quality issues such as raster lines shown on movement and choppier framerate. I'm sure the lag issues are due to the fact that this is a hardware accelerated card, meaning it takes some of the load off the CPU while capturing. It also seems to be proprietary to MPEG-2 and only captures at one preset size that isn't even fullscreen.
At this point after mucking around with this for weeks, I am extremely frusterated. I paid a lot of good money for this high end tv tuner card and I haven't even been able to successfully use it once for what I'm looking to do with it (play and record console gaming). Watching TV on my computer sitting upright is not the same as lying like a lazy ass on my queen sized bed watching a 30"er. I've always had good luck with ATI's products, but is seems they may be getting a little more sloppy on the tech support side of things. Once again, all I'm looking to do is find a seperate capture card that does exactly as my old All In Wonder 128 card did which is offer lagless play on a computer screen and allow me to record gameplay uncompressed so I could then recompress it down to size and send it to people. Or perhaps there is a better method for capturing video game gameplay that I am not aware of. I thought I couldn't go wrong with a $200 dollar TV Tuner from ATI, but somehow I did. It does not acceptably offer what I am looking to do with it. There can't be any lag or high response time if you want to play a game that is supposed to respond immediately. One alternative I guess could be to record onto a VHS tape and then put it through the card, but that would result in double compression and quality loss (Source --> VHS --> DivX). Anyways, I would really appreciate any sort of tips or suggestions whatsoever to make me feel that this wasn't a total loss...
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