Any of you guys tried capturing video from the Xbox 360? Looking to do some high-quality gameplay clips, and I’m curious as to what kind of equipment I need.
Ideally, I’d love to grab 720p footage.
Anyone here messed with component or HDMI capture from consoles? Trying to figure out the best capture card.
Here’s what Major Nelson did for his HD captures, though it’s a pretty pricey card. HD takes a ton of compression processing.
Nelson, eh? Well, not like I could walk 30 feet down the hall and ask him or anything… :)
I’ve captured some 360 output by using an S-Video cable (~$12) combined with one of those cheap USB-based video capture devices for PCs (~$10 off of Woot a few months back). The quality is, of course, not high-def but the price was much lower and in my case the end result of the clips were Flash video clips on the web where a full-on HD source wouldn’t have been that useful because it would have had to been compressed so much anyway. If you absolutely must have high-def quality video, I’ve heard good things about that HDMI capture card mentioned in the link above from other sources, so it is probably a good option. There are also some VGA capture options but back when I looked into this they were even more expensive than that HDMI one and had even more problems with handling full motion video sources in real-time.
Yeah, something like the Hauppauge PVR cards will be able to capture at 720x480, the same res as DVD at least. They typically sacrifice image quality to keep costs down and do encoding in real-time (e.g., they select sub-optimal quantization profiles and motion vectors, insert a lot of padding to meet the bitrate), so for best quality you’d want to record at the highest bitrate possible and then transcode down to something else that’s more efficient.
The solution is to NOT let the card handle compression, and encode it afterwards with VDub, or similar tools.