How do I watch incoming S-video on my PC?
November 6, 2004 10:45 AM   Subscribe

How do I watch incoming S-video on my Windows PC? I have a GeForce 4 Ti4200 with Video-In/Video-Out and the nVidia WDM video capture driver. Is there a better app to view the video than dScaler?

A little more detail.. I'm trying to view the output of Grand Theft Auto (on PS2) on my PC's monitor, using the video capture interface. It works OK with dscaler but no matter what deinterlace method I pick I get some awful artifacts when things are moving fast on screen (ie: always). I hadn't realized how complex deinterlacing was! Any advice?
posted by Nelson to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)
 
Anil's been playing huge tournament games with his nintendo gamecubes and told me a S-video-to-vga adapter was the only way to go. Something like one of these on eBay is what you need, as far as I know.
posted by mathowie at 11:16 AM on November 6, 2004


Best answer: Nelson, give atv2000 a try. I like it for video games input on my ATI Radeon.

BTW: You can get a TV to VGA converter cheaper here (yes, I deal with them -- they aren't scammers). [EMS shipping takes 1 week from China, BTW] :-)
posted by shepd at 12:12 PM on November 6, 2004


Yep, those VGA boxes do the trick. For the best quality, try to get one with component input instead of just S-Video, as Component's Y/Pb/Pr is a lot closer than S-Video's Y/C to the RGB input your monitor expects. Less conversion = more quality.
posted by zsazsa at 12:49 PM on November 6, 2004


Response by poster: Thanks for the answers! Extra hardware is a bit further than I want to commit at the moment and I'd like the bits to flow through my PC so I can capture them. But hardware is a nice approach. I see that both the PS2 and Xbox support progressive output on the component channels, should be quite easy to convert that to VGA.

shepd, thank you for recommending atv2000. That's just the kind of thing I wanted. It looks like the difference between atv2000 and dscaler is that atv2000 isn't trying to do anything clever about deinterlacing. The atv2000 result is shimmery, but it doesn't have all the weird judder tearing and stuff that dscaler has with high motion video. Ie: it makes my monitor more like a dumb ol' tv. Fine by me.

atv2000 has nice video capture options, too. But all this makes me wonder, how many other apps like atv2000 are out there?
posted by Nelson at 1:02 PM on November 6, 2004


Response by poster: BTW, I found this visual explanation of the challenge of deinterlacing video.
posted by Nelson at 1:06 PM on November 6, 2004


Response by poster: For the record, I wrote up a summary of how to watch video on your Windows box.
posted by Nelson at 9:48 AM on November 7, 2004


Man, nelson, you're a veritable fountain of information today!

Good going!

One small thing I can suggest: If you like TV on your monitor, keep choosing the 4:3 ratios for monitor size. Stuff like 1280x1024 is out for this work (5:4 ratio).
posted by shepd at 1:22 PM on November 7, 2004


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