I wouldn't bother with the Laptop, as the cards are more expensive. You also want decent CPU grunt for the encoding.

Linux actually has really good support for the Brooktree/Conexant and Philips SAA713X cards. I think some of the pcmcia cards use these chips.

The problem on Linux is a lack of decent capturing tools. Xawtv works but is crap, zapping is good but doesn't work, transcode is excellent but command line only. vlc seems like the best solution, but is awkward to use.

Once you have captured raw, you should then get hold of avidemux, which is an excellent media transcoding/editing tool. In there crop borders, resize, deinterlace if you are feeling cocky, and compress using two pass xvid and lame mp3.

The Hauppage Nova-T cards based on SAA713x are highly regarded, but basically any recent card using a SAA713x or BT8x8 will work fine. You'd be looking at spending £25 - £35 for a PCI card.

They might've got a working combination in Ubuntu, you never know. They do like to have a play.

I'll have to burn a disc and have a play, as my Debian is fried again, damnd Floating Point issues.

Wonder if they've got the flgrx stuff in Ubuntu sans mucking about.

That puts me in a dodgy position as I've got my heart set on ditching the desktop pc cos I need the room.

The laptop I was planning on buying I thought would have more than enough grunt, it was gonna be a core duo surely enough to capture.

I was expecting to be hit with an extra cost to get a card for a laptop.

Shudder. The very mention of flgrx makes my hair turn grey.

Do you think it's ever possible to get your linux box to a state where everything works exactly as you want it?

fglrx

fglrx

fingers

Personally, no desktop machine is ever in a state to do anything to my satisfcation. I have esoteric needs. I do have a wee server that is fairly static in its configuration, samba, dhcpd, routing, that kinda gig. Desktop machines are soo darn volatile that, pretending I'm not going to blitz it within a month is futile.

Thats a comment on me, and not linux, as my Windows installs barely last as long either.... what with my knack of destroying hardware soo frequently.

I'm basically cursed.

Mine is really, really close. Couple of small niggles, otherwise currently more usable than my Windows install.

It does a much better job of DVB-T than Windows anyway, which seems to be down to better drivers.

Lots of codecs in Ubuntu installation. It has Avidemux package and other applications Papercut has said. It is easy if good hardware!

I really should have gone with Ubuntu. I'm just not advanced enough to make best use of Gentoos advantages. That said my system isn't far off from being perfect. As Paper says it's those niggles that just eat me up. I've got some sort of gdm problem, which is pissing me right off. It won't start unless I start it manually as root and the damn thing crashes when I log out sometimes (most frustrating).

There's a list as long as my arm of tweaks and fixes that I would like to make to get it working exactly as I would like, but it's certainly usable now and in terms of software there's a lot to like. Gaim, Scribus, Inkscape, GIMP, OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird are all scoring highly with me at the moment.

Video capping would be good to set up, but I'll wait for you peeps to work it all out and then suck the knowledge right out of you }:)

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I'm investing in the official Ubuntu book, so I'll be a fountain of knowledge.

First thing will be to get gnome looking good which is almost impossible, but I thikn that mac style start menu thing and GLX will be the best thing.

I'm showing my top secret side here btw, but Sun's Project Looking glass looks hot! Best desktop environment ev3r!!!

Interested in the Mac style launcher, what's the package for that one?

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http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/09/06/vistas-ui-is-better-than-this/
http://www.bootlog.cl/blog/linux/la-famosa-barrita-de-mac-en-ubuntu/

Thats a spicey meata balla.

Gotta check that out.

But don't get me started on modern GUI implimentations.

Personally speaking Project Looking glass is the future http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/demo.xml

Hmm I'm not overly convinced with the 3d fluff. Seems like form over substance to me. Still people have been talking about 3d gui for about 20 years so it was bound to happen sooner or later.
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There are difficulties in justifying spinning cubes of fluff, when the underlying principles of the GUI are so fundamentally wrong....

or whatever....

The Looking Glass one seemed to have the most thought behind actual functionality... but how many videos are you going to want to be watching simultaneously upside down... none! That's the same trick they've been pulling out of the hat for decades... wooo multiple video streams!

There is something intrinsically clever and intuative that can be done with a 3d interface... and not the making right whats wrong with current WIMP style GUIs we have at the moment. But I'm not payed millions by SUN to think of them, so I am telling. Nerrrr. (and I don't really have any at the moment).

Well for a start you will need the 3D version of this.

http://www.io2technology.com/

Which they blatantly have tucked away in an R&D lab somewhere. Then you're in Minority Report territory.

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Sorry to resurrect this old thread, but I'm desperate to get my capturing started especially toward the end of the Feb cos I want to capture some Triggerheart stuff.

This external box 'looks' to be a goodie especially after reading the "what laptop" review.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/AVerMedia-AVerTV-USB-2-0-Plus-PC-Laptop-PS2-XBOX_W0QQitemZ270079196669QQihZ017QQcategoryZ3761QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

There's one problem, I'll be capturing off a PAL GC, a modded PSX and a PAL DC.

If I remember there's no s-video on PAL GC's, and I'm not even sure if the PSX/DC have an s-video input. So what is an 'AV' input that is listed next to the s-video bit.

Oh and sorry for the retarded question, this will go alongside my wireless disaster thread
_____________________

PS1 and DC can both do S-Video.

AV probably means composite video and stereo audio phono jacks.

Your problem might be PAL 60 for the DC though, unless its an ntsc machine. Most capture cards barf on PAL 60.

If that device could capture from the redundant composite lead on my 360 component cable all would be fine...

I'm certainly not playing in 50hz with a split composite connection though, just so you lot can go "Nice vid!".

Exactly.

Although an NTSC console running 480i, and some decent deinterlacing software (DScaler basically) is manageable

That's the problem I have with my Wii - I want to put Gundam vids up on YouTube but just the thought of playing it in composite via the splitter makes me cringe!

________________________________

"I laughed in her face and stole some pick&mix!" -

You can play in RGB though I think with composite lead go to capture card from splitter box? You see TV in RGB when computer record video output. Unless you have component that is. I think Commander Marklar on NTSC-uk do this with Argos RGB splitter box as he post pictures before. I speak to him again.

Does composite lead work on component 360 lead when playing component? I guess not but I did not think to try that. That would be useful if it did! I could capture 360 video clips of my horse in Oblivion. That is hardcore!

_____________________________

"And I'm Barry Hercules, Doc"

I'm not sure that will work tbh Sebastian. I imagine the video mode is switched depending on what cable you insert into the console. I can't imagine you getting composite video and RGB out at the same time. Could be wrong though.

More than likely you will need to build something like this

http://www.nexusuk.org/projects/rgb2svid/

I'm sure Saur could knock that together in an evening provided he had enough green

My bad,

Reading that page it seems that most devices output composite and RGB simultaneously, using the composite signal to provide sync. Does this hold true for the various consoles?

To get S-Video capture you'd still need the above converter though if you wanted to split the signal to TV capture card and PC.

AHH all this cable talk is giving me a headache.

I get what Paper is saying though regarding 60hnz, I'll have to check the specs on the official site.

I've got an odd setup with my gc cos my TV has ran out of scart sockets so I had to take off the scart bit and put the 3 cables into the front of my tele (white red yellow).

But then my DC/PSX are hooked up via scart, so I'm not sure how flexible these capture thingy's are regarding multiple peices of hardware trying to capture from the same device.

Maybe there's like a generic lead or something that can be the middle man?

_____________________

Yes that is what I think with 360 (HD and composite haha!). But Argos RGB splitter box has composite output on it so that can go to TV card if RGB scart has composite pins. That is what Marklar says! So yes if cable has pins then it work. Official DC RGB lead has RGB so that does not but I think others have composite pins so that picture can be captured Even if not I am sure third-party lead will have pin.

Shame on your for playing GC in composite! You can use RGB splitter to fix RGB lead problem. 3 (or more!) cable to 1 SCART into TV and use composite out on splitter (the Argos one) to PC that capture video

Here we go:

_____________________________
"And I'm Barry Hercules, Doc"

I have a generic lead, which plugs into XBox, GC and PS2. The other end is S-Video and there's a little switch to select between the different machines. Almost all capture cards will support composite video (yellow phono) and S-video (4 pin mini-din), so that would sort you out. I picked up mine from Gamestation a while back.

Now I could have purchased a splitter for the S-video and audio outputs to plumb the signal into my Tele and PC simultaneously. That way I can play on the Tele and capture on my PC. However I haven't done this as yet and probably never will.

Yeah, thats exactly right. RGB scart is meant to replace composite video signal with a composite sync signal, but in practice most consoles give you composite video on this pin (which is sync + luminance + chrominance - some RGB monitors, like some versions of the Commodore 1084, will barf at this as they expect comp sync only).

The main thing is that running anything other than 480i isn't going to work if you are splitting off a video connection to your capture card. You could spend £1,200 on a prog scan component capture card though, instead

So with 480i RGB blasting out your CRT, its easy to pick off composite video from the same source. Either composite video on the TV (does work for some), or from some kind of Scart splitter, like the Argos box, which also works fine.

The DC provides composite sync though as you say, so that won't work, certainly for the official RGB cable. They are on different pins of the DC AV port, but there is a chance composite video is disabled when switched to RGB - not sure. You could do s-video and composite video at the same time though.

It is better to give your capture cards s-video if you can, mind

This is how I have always captured video. I'm having a problem with the Wii because this setup is not possible, the NTSC machine does not output RGB and I cant tap a composite video signal AND play through component at the same time.

Composite on my TV looks shocking - the whole image is crawling.

________________________________

"I laughed in her face and stole some pick&mix!" -

When people were hacking about making component cables on the neogaf forums, someone said they could run component and composite video at the same time. If you ran in 480i, that might be workable. It might be possible to get s-video and composite video at the same time too.

Probably need hacking up a cable

The problem is composite looks fugly on my cap card. S-Video seems to reproduce colour and contrast much better. Time to invest in a new card perhaps

That's long - I got this new setup cos I'm so sick of having to haxx0r cables! T_T - may as well just face facts that gaming IS the haxx0ring of cables.

________________________________

"I laughed in her face and stole some pick&mix!" -

This all sounds like too much hard work. I'm just going to borrow video cameras from work when I need to record something special, which is about once every three years for me.

I'd just like to add that vector based gfx programs are also too much hard fucking work. I need a smoke, here at work, at my desk.

I'll swap "vector based gfx programs" with python programming and our cms.

Drawing in flash is made so simple that it's actually very shitty. I'm trying to draw some piss-easy simple cliffs and weird lines keep appearing out of nowhere. This is the third time in an hour I've had to start again.

Anyhow, now hoping to get some Akrid Beastiality in .AVI form for Monday. I might record some failures just to show how much pasting Wayne gets when things go wrong.

Vector = teh win, but they're more tricksy to use.

Why don't you just draw it using a normal bitmap package and then get the vector package to trace it. I've had pretty decent results using the tracer in inkscape.

Using trace bitmap in flash is well easy, it's just that I take the drawing tools for granted as being so easy and when it all goes wrong I won't let it beat me. :?

Well keep plugging away at it.

I'm trying to put together some game assets in inkscape at the moment. For my money using vectors may be more difficult initially, but it gives you so much more flexibility later on even if you're going to convert it into a bitmap format.

Got my YouTube channel sorted now so I'll have to get recording some funny stuff from games, such as the exploding-then-flying mini snail man from Perfect Dark, as well as blowing up Cassandra so she flies through her office roof. I just wish I had a more convenient means rather than having to borrow this massive expensive Sony HD cam from work every time.

Was fun going around everybody's channels, I got back to work an hour late though. :S Had to lie about my doctor's appointment taking forever.

Thanks to the wonders of replay save I could record some F-Zero class, however on closer inspection even my best replays have moments of shitness that need clearing up.

EDIT: It's a good job I can't get on YouTube at work. It's seriously addictive!! I've just spent ages torturing myself over videos of watching people play GradiusV on loop 255 with ease. Moments like that make me want to give up gaming for good.