Originally posted by Foxhack
Don't even bother with set-top DVD Recorders for modern systems. All the ones I've used suck at recording videogame footage because they compress the -crap- out of things.
Actually, the one I have was pretty good for this type of thing when it was working. It has an "XP" setting for recording on DVD which limits it to something like one hour per single-layer disc. Moot point, however, since it doesn't work anymore.
Originally posted by Foxhack
If your computer's fast enough, PCSX2 can be pretty decent. I don't capture video with it, but the screenshots are pretty awesome. (I'll go back and finish this when my computer doesn't overheat so often.)
Well, I would try PCSX2, but last I checked it has some slight visual anomalies with the retail version of GH2, and the demos have their own visual anomalies in places on the hardware (due to being incomplete), so in this case I'll prefer to capture from my PS2. My capture card does MPEG-2, I think in hardware, as I've never had it drop a single frame ever, but it does it in excellent quality - I have several episodes of a half-hour game show on my hard drive with commercials edited out (losslessly edited, so minimal recompression of frames only around the edit points to create new GOPs as needed), which comes out to 1.35GB for 21:29 of video, audio is 384kbps MPEG-1 layer 2. That's 1,452,394,500 bytes for 1289 seconds of A/V, or an average bitrate of 1,126,761 bytes per second, in this case roughly 8802kbps for both audio and video, if you subtract 384kbps CBR from that's almost 8.5Mbps just for video. I'll do some test captures when I do get my PS2 back over here and see how the quality is with Guitar Hero.
In this case, to save space on the server, I would like to request permission to upload still shots captured with my card as highest quality JPG instead of PNG. Reason being, the image is already compressed coming into my computer, which means there will be minor compression artifacts and chroma downsampling from the ideal RGB 4:4:4 capture. Thus, converting these stills to PNG would only make larger files, without any of the usual PNG benefits. I'll be using s-video to capture, as that's the best my capture card supports (I do have a Firewire capture box that supports 480i component, but it hardware compresses to 25Mbps DV, which in NTSC land has arguably worse chroma downsampling [4:1:1, or 4 times wider chroma pixels than luma] than MPEG-2 [4:2:0, which can have issues with interlaced material if improperly processed, which I will take care not to do], negating any possible benefits to using component over s-video, and my PC doesn't even have a Firewire port).
Unless someone wants to buy me a good PCI-E component capture card? j/k
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