Recording Game footage on DVD and other stuff.

[buzz909]

How can I record live footage from my video-game consoles onto dvd? Ideally I'd like to do it in 60Hz, but 50Hz is ok failing that. I am willing to spend money on equipment to be able to do so. Please help. Also will I be able to edit any footage I record? also to be able to do a slo-mo effect would be cool!
Also if I get MAME running on my PC (which I haven't bought yet!), what kind of ouput on the gfx card do I need to get console quality output (RGB?) on my TV set. I have to play games on my TV set! Is it possible to get a PC to display on a TV set in high quality. I really want to write my own 2D/3D multiplayer games, and to play them in the lounge with friends on a big widescreen TV.

Thanks - I'm totally out of touch with hardware so I'd really appeciate any help.

BUzz.

P.S. can anyone suggest a good flexible games programming language. I was using Blitz Basic, but this was a good few years back, so maybe it isn't the best anymore?

[Lyris]

How can I record live footage from my video-game consoles onto dvd? Ideally I'd like to do it in 60Hz, but 50Hz is ok failing that. I am willing to spend money on equipment to be able to do so. Please help. Also will I be able to edit any footage I record?

There's two options. One is to get a DVD/HDD recorder: if you want that, look into the Pioneer DVD/Hard Disk Drive recorders. I think all of them have a setting to switch between 525 (NTSC) and 625 (PAL) input but download the manual before you buy to be sure. They accept video input over Composite (with pretty decent dot crawl reduction), S-Video, and RGB SCART. Avoid anything Sony. Unless they've changed, they'll give you a grey screen if you try and record anything other than PAL.

You can do basic edits, that is, cut sections out after recording, but it can be a bit tricky to get the exact frame due to the nature of compressed MPEG-2 video.

You won't be able to do slow-mo effects, that would need more complex editing on a PC.

The alternative is to buy a TV capture stick for your PC, edit the resulting video file, encode it and author a DVD out of it. It's a lot cheaper but involves knowledge of video capture, processing, and encoding, you need to do each step manualy.

Also if I get MAME running on my PC (which I haven't bought yet!), what kind of ouput on the gfx card do I need to get console quality output (RGB?) on my TV set. I have to play games on my TV set! Is it possible to get a PC to display on a TV set in high quality.

Just about all graphics cards now can output S-Video, so you'll get decent-ish quality (just be sure to go into the Graphics options and turn the Flicker Filter all the way off). None of them will directly output RGB SCART. I think all the modern ones also output Component but DVD recorders over here don't accept that as an input, so you'd need to pay 50-90 pounds for a Component to RGB SCART converter (ouch).

[buzz909]

Thanks Lyris for all your help. A bit strange that modern gfx cards don't ouput higher quality signals. I heard s-video was inferior to RGB. Not sure if I'll bother now. If you can buy VCRs which record PAL-60 via RGB then I might try and buy a second-hand one, since I'm not that fussed about the quality, although I would like to record in 60HZ.

Buzz

[Lyris]

S-Video's inferior to RGB, yeah, but TV-friendly RGB was only available in Europe over the big, clumsy SCART connector. So adding it to graphics cards didn't really happen.

You won't find a VHS recorder that records PAL60. In fact, you'll probably need to import one from an NTSC country to find one that even records NTSC (and then you'd need to transcode the PAL60 signal to get it in colour).

It's odd how there's no cheaper all-in-one option.