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Topic: Capturing Gameplay

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Wargo
rank 8
Posted:
Sun Jan 24, 2016 2:40 pm
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Does anyone have a device they record video with on the Dreamcast?
 
Einhander
rank 20
Posted:
Sun Jan 24, 2016 8:31 pm
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I've actually been in the process of putting together a video capturing setup for my Dreamcast. It has taken a while to get everything together due to some surprise priorities that popped up, but the final piece arrived the day before yesterday.

Right now I'm using a VGA adapter, a VGA to HDMI scaler, and a capture card to record small footage samples using OBS while I fine tune things. So far I've had to deal with an audio delay (fixed by running audio directly from the DC to the capture card, bypassing the scaler), a slightly dark image (fixed by upping the brightness slightly) and a slightly wider than 4:3 but not quite 16:9 image (fixed by changing the image size in OBS).

The resulting quality isn't too bad, but I'm still working on making the image look as nice as possible. Were you thinking of setting one up?
 
Wargo
rank 8
Posted:
Sun Jan 24, 2016 10:48 pm
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I would like a similar setup that you have. I currently have my Dreamcast hooked up to my tv using the standard cables. I know i mentioned in another topic about the VGA box. My plan is that I would like to start a review site maybe of the Dreamcast and or other consoles. If not, I would still like to share the word. Out of all the consoles, the Dreamcast was the innovator that I still thoroughly enjoy. I just want to maximize whatever I can with the Dreamcast I have. I was thinking about maybe capturing like maybe an hours of gameplay at a time. I have a spare computer to store this information. I'm just not 100 how to go about it.
 
Einhander
rank 20
Posted:
Tue Jan 26, 2016 12:13 am
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I'll mention it here instead of in the other thread, since capture cards are off topic for the General Online forum.

I did end up getting some hefty lag using the scaler. I was looking at a time difference of around 100ms (the difference between 0.00 and 0.10, so one tenth of a second). In something like a turn based RPG or a puzzle game 100ms wouldn't really cause any trouble, but anything that required fast reflexes would be significantly impacted.

I'm not surprised it was that high, I'm routing the video from the console to a VGA splitter, with one lead going from there to a scaler, then to a capture card, where it is then processed by my PC and output onto my monitor, so between the Dreamcast and the screen there are four pieces of hardware in the way. The plan is to keep the setup the way it is now, with a VGA splitter outputting a direct feed at 480p to one monitor, and the other feed going through the scaler to be upscaled to either 720p or 1080p* and then into the capture card to be recorded. This way I can play the game on the direct feed monitor without worrying about added latency while still being able to record gameplay at a higher resolution (and keep tabs on the recording process on the other monitor).

The capture card I used was an Avermedia Game Broadcaster HD. I chose this card specifically because it featured VGA input. The plan was to just do a direct capture from the VGA adapter connected to the Dreamcast, but the resulting image quality was not very good. This is why I bought the upscaler. The quality with it is much better, although still not as nice as I would like. The scaler is an etekcity VGA to HDMI upscaler, so far it is working fine. I'll try and post some test footage tonight or tomorrow so you can see what I was able to get with this hardware.

*One major downside to the Avermedia card is that while it can capture 720p video at 60fps, 1080p video capture is limited to 30fps, so if a game runs at 60fps than I will have to record at 720p instead of 1080p in order to maintain the smoothness of 60fps gameplay.
 
Wargo
rank 8
Posted:
Wed Jan 27, 2016 6:04 pm
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Posts: 77
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Thats disappointing. The one wrestling game I have, Fire Pro Wrestling, lag has to be at the minimum since you have to input the commands before grappling with the other wrestler. Its at the point if there is lag the game is practically unplayable. Without the capture card, was regular vga output have lag?
 
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