Video capture card purchase help

Schide

Let's Play people, help me!

Does anyone have any suggestions for a relatively inexpensive video capture card that I could use to capture my PS2 or X-Box or whatever and potentially record a Let's Play from it? Preferably something that has an S-Video input. I've tried Googling for it, but I'm not quite sure what would even work that well for this. There's this thing on Ebay. But it doesn't really look...y'know, that great. And I'm always wary of stuff like this from Ebay. So basically, any suggestions would be very helpful, thanks.

yalborap

For my few efforts, I use a Gamebridge. You can get 'em on Ebay for about 10-30 bucks.

Is it great? No, not really.

Does it matter? Dude, you're putting this stuff on Youtube or some similar site. They're going to smash your video quality with a sledgehammer anyways.

mspencer

I'm apparently behind the times then. In a drawer somewhere I still have an old Pinnacle PCI video capture card, and last time I used it video capture was a "close all programs, start capturing, and pray" system hogging proposition. Now it looks like you can get a dinky little USB device that does all the work for you and spits out an MPEG bitstream over USB. Attack of the Show just reviewed some $130-ish device into which you plug a USB mass storage device (from thumbdrive to hard disk enclosure) and video cables, and it captures, encodes, and saves everything for you, no PC required.

So I should ask: is the video capture "problem" so well solved now that ANY cheap-ass USB device can be expected to handle anything you throw at it?

(AV pros always freak the fuck out any time I take any recording device that compresses and try to even remotely compare it with something "broadcast quality"; but to me the best quality I'd ever need is "if I can plug it into my TV and hit play and not see any compression artifacts, that's as good as I'll ever need." So with that in mind, can I reasonably expect near-broadcast-quality recordings from most of these devices?)

yalborap

mspencer wrote: »

I'm apparently behind the times then. In a drawer somewhere I still have an old Pinnacle PCI video capture card, and last time I used it video capture was a "close all programs, start capturing, and pray" system hogging proposition. Now it looks like you can get a dinky little USB device that does all the work for you and spits out an MPEG bitstream over USB. Attack of the Show just reviewed some $130-ish device into which you plug a USB mass storage device (from thumbdrive to hard disk enclosure) and video cables, and it captures, encodes, and saves everything for you, no PC required.

So I should ask: is the video capture "problem" so well solved now that ANY cheap-ass USB device can be expected to handle anything you throw at it?

(AV pros always freak the fuck out any time I take any recording device that compresses and try to even remotely compare it with something "broadcast quality"; but to me the best quality I'd ever need is "if I can plug it into my TV and hit play and not see any compression artifacts, that's as good as I'll ever need." So with that in mind, can I reasonably expect near-broadcast-quality recordings from most of these devices?)

You can expect pretty decent quality from the cheapo devices.

Get a high cost, high quality one, though? GREAT quality. The good ones these days are like you said; they do all the work for you. You drop it in, hook in the inputs, it spits it out into a ready-to-go file all pre-processed and stuff.

And when I say 'high cost', I'm talking like 2-300 max here. 150 will usually get ya something good if you can do internal.