Best Video Capture Method/Hardware For Games?

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v0rtic3s

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 20, 2006
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I'm speaking of capturing high quality gameplay directly from one PC to another for doing things such as reviews etc.

What's the best way/best hardware and software to do this?

There are internal and external cards, most of which I've found don't seem to have gotten great reviews.
Internal or external device is fine with me, as long as it's solid and works well.

Most seems to also have component jacks, so I've no idea how one would go from one PC to another.

I'm not really familiar with this subject, so any help would be appreciated.

P.S.
Would be best to have a card/method that captures both the video and audio, if possible.
 
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Actually, after some reading, it seems that internal video capture cards are the best way to go, as to get high quality video and without any lag (when recording from console, though I also need to be able to go from PC to PC). Problem is that they're still always component inputs, usually.

But, they're stating that the HD PVR (which I've seen before and passed-up at the time) is great for recording games.

Whether internal or external, how do you go from one PC to another? What connections do you use when there's only component and S-video inputs for this type of hardware? Is there some form of adapter to be used?
 
Fraps is awesome, and was just updated to record at 26xx x 19xx or what ever that insane resolution is lol.
 
Yep, Fraps is the most awesome software solution. It even supports lossless RGB for color preservation. Just need a fast hard drive/raid array to record the data at full speed though.

Keep in mind that, although its capable of lossless RGB, most video by far only support YUV 4:2:0 colorspace or something like that. It's basically everything you see on youtube, DVDs, Blu-rays, etc. That's why you'll almost never see a gameplay video that preserves 100% of the colors of the original. Especially the vivid reds. MPEG-2, H.264, VC1, all of it. Until, someone decides to implement full chroma (I think its 4:4:4), and have a decoder support it, it's way far off from the mass market.

It's a nice feature to have to preserve the exact game colors, but not all too necessary.

EDIT: Keep in mind that there are a number of RGB codecs out there, but are not popular and very impractical.
 
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