Hardware Capture Card for on PC gaming

[Ryutso]

Okay so every year, my robotics team and I take trips to regionals and the finals and whatnot. Usually, we check into a hotel room that doesn't provide composite inputs for the Wii, so one year we tried and RF modulator.

That didn't work at all, because the hotel doesn't actually let you change the TV to channel 3 or 4. So I saw this capture card, that had a USB stick for my laptop and composite inputs for my Wii!

However, I'm slightly confused as to which one to buy. So I'm looking for personal preferences for Capture Cards and hopefully links.

 

[Dees_Troy]

Most of the time you'll have difficulty with any capture card or TV tuner and a computer. Usually whatever software is used will buffer some of the video stream to the hard drive to enable some of the DVR-type functions. In doing so, you'll get about a 2 second delay in the video making it wholly useless for gaming.

Even if you find software that does not do any buffering, the process of encoding the analog stream to MPEG2 and then decoding it for display will introduce enough of a delay or lag that will make playing most games very difficult. If you can't use the hotel's TV, then your best bet is to pack your own LCD TV.

 

[GameDragon]

A capture card isn't what you want. Dees_Troy is right, you'd get a couple seconds of lag with that.

What you need is a VGA box. That will allow you to use any composite or component console directly on your monitor or laptop.

 

[PsyBlade]

A capture card isn't what you want. Dees_Troy is right, you'd get a couple seconds of lag with that.

What you need is a VGA box. That will allow you to use any composite or component console directly on your monitor or laptop.

While I always liked the idea I have never seen a laptop with a VGA (or DVI) input.

 

[Cermage]

ezcap is the easiest solution. i have one, provides okay video quality, okay sound quality if you have the right drivers. the only lag i notice is some sound, and its quite rare. i have one hooked up to a ps2, wii and 360. shame it can't display 720p. otherwise i've been pretty happy with it for about half a year now. i've got a 116 but dc60+ seems to be your best bet now. good thing its all usb as well.

 

[OSW]

The ezcap dc60 works fine, but the quality is much better with the dc60+ and higher range models. I haven't actually tested with Wii but it works with my ps1, although the s-video only does black and white....