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Game capture
Hardware capture How to record AC videos using two computers written by Fokus (source) April 14th, 2003 Computer 1 has a GeForce 4 TI 4600 using the S-Video out, this in turn is running into Computer 2, which has an ATI Rage Pro 128 using the S-Video in. With Nvidia video cards and a newer version of the drivers, under the settings tab in display properties, it shows two displays, my main on the GF, and the "Default" monitor(which is actually Computer 2). Although these bars have sliders, only the monitor hooked up to your computer(atleast for me) is effected by this bar. Under the advanced section, and the GeFroce 4 Ti 4600 tab, you will see on the left hand side that there is an nView display mode selection. In there you can choose clone. By choosing clone, that will output through your Display 1 (your monitor) and your Display 2 (your S-Video out) the same image. Now, for me, the ATI Rage Pro will only allow up to 800x600 resolution of video capture, so if I run anything higher than that, the other computer's capture is limited to 800x600 view of my screen, not scaled down, but 800x600 at a time, so if you were running 1280x1024, you are only seeing about 3/4 of what is being displayed, depending on where your mouse is. On your secondary computer, if you have either an all in wonder, tv in, or a tv capture card, your best bet is to probably use recording software that is provided to you by that company. For me, this is one of ATI's multimedia centers. Since I am in a dorm and don't really have room for an entire second computer, I am using freeware software called VNC Viewer. With Computers 1 and 2 networked, this allows me to remotely access Computer 2 through my main, displaying it's desktop on my screen, using my main computer's mouse and keyboard to operate it as if I was physically on the computer itself. This is not a must, but definitely beats constant switching of keyboards, chairs, monitors, etc. At 800x600 capturing 25 frames per second, I can record about two hours worth of footage on a 5 gig drive that is in Computer 2, while maintaining lossless quality and performance of Computer 1. It is a MUST that if your second computer gets turned off, or your cable becomes unplugged, that you set your display mode back to clone, otherwise your capture will just be a blank screen(I can't count how many times I've done this). Also, this is for video recording only, in the above posts there are ways to capture audio, so if you want that, you will have to run both at the same time, and figure out some way to get them together This technique will give you real-time game play and depending on your hardware you have, higher, and possibly normal gaming resolutions for you, but will naturally result in larger video files. |