Help me display Playstation on my Mac

March 12, 2012 8:15 PM

I'm hooking up a gaming console to my Mac Pro, via a FW Miglia Director's Cut Take Two, which is apparently natively recognized as a camcorder by OS X. What app do I need to cleanly display the game on my screen?

I've had the recent urge to play Gran Turismo, after having not done so since college many years ago. I don't have a TV, but I do have a quad 2.66 Mac Pro with 3 screens. So I purchased a used Playstation 2, a Firewire video converter, and the game. Now I just need to know what the best way to watch the game on my screen is... iMovie seems like a kludge, but if that's the best option, so be it.

I'm not interested in buying a TV. I don't really have a spot in the house to put it anyway.

Any help is greatly appreciated - thanks!!

posted by stewiethegreat to Technology (3 answers total)

If you have any video editing software, it should allow you to view a live incoming feed over firewire. I know its using a cannon to kill a mosquito, but I've actually done this before with Final Cut Pro and a game cube, then shot super smash bros onto a 18 foot tall theater screen. IMHO anything under a ten foot screen is for light weights.
posted by KeSetAffinityThread at 8:42 PM on March 12, 2012

Ive tried this. There are some standalone Firewire monitoring tools out there, but most have been abandoned. iMovie does seem like overkill but it works pretty well and idles fairly low.... but it's probably going to be unplayable. Latency between the source and the screen is never an issue in these applications so the displays aren't optimized for the low latency you need to be able to play a videogame. just a few milliseconds delay between the PS2 output and the display will render the game frustratingly hard, especially for a game like gran turismo. The FW interface will introduce some latency and iMovie a little more... it won't be pretty. Try it with iMovie and see if you can stand it before looking for other solutions.
posted by ulotrichous at 8:57 PM on March 12, 2012

Could you try using VLC?
posted by TheNewWazoo at 1:35 PM on March 13, 2012