I've seen several posts recently about this and wanted to share what I have learned.
BattleClinic originally planned on offering this as a free service. That was $4,800 ago. Here is what we've learned, and it was an expensive lesson!
1. You will need a dual-processor machine with 1 to 1.5GB of RAM and 100GB free space.
2. You will need Adobe Premiere for $700.
3. You will need a Radeon 9700/9800 pro or Nvidia 5900 with SVIDEO out, and another PC with an equally high-end video card that will accept SVIDEO in. Alternatively, you can port the SVIDEO to a digital tape recorder (DAT) or a high-end DVD encoder. A standard PC with a CDWR or DVDRW might work, barely.
4. You will need a special program (not FRAPS), professional grade, which is capable of capturing directx from the video stream at acceptable resolution and frame-rate. Alternatively, you could capture the SVIDEO feed, but you won't get sound. You'll need to patch your soundblasters together and get soundforge to capture and synchronize the audio.
When you have all of that, you will be able to make recordings of your games. Here's why you can't use the "cheap way."
If you try to use FRAPS, you won't get high enough screen resolution. Also, unless your PC is server-class, and I mean extremely high-end, it will not be able to handle playing the game AND capturing & writing all of the data for the video and sound. You'll end up lagging the video badly because the frame-rate will go down to almost nothing. You can't solve this by porting the signal out and using FRAPS on a different PC, because FRAPS sits in the host PC's memory and captures the stream while it's in the video memory, not at the cable-out.
If you try to use SNAGIT or a similar program, you'll encounter the same problem as FRAPS, and on top of that, you'll find that you can't use any of the "free" version because they'll 1) imprint a "unregistered version" code on your movie, 2) won't give you proper functionality in a demo version anyway, and 3) require too much overhead to run effectively to get directx games.
You do have a "poor man's option."
Patch your SVIDEO or Analog video out (if you have a card which does this) to a digital recorder, like your camcorder, or to a plain-old-VCR, make a tape, then use a capturing program to recompile the video. It may work, if your video card is set properly, but the resolution will be kinda poor because the most you'll get going out is 640x480 on today's cards (or less, since most of those out-ports are meant to drive TVs.) Remember, you won't get any sound with this option, unless you patch your soundblaster line-out to the camera/recorder line in.
Good luck. If you want, because BattleClinic has done all of this research and has all of the equipment, drop me a line and I can do it for you. It won't be free, but if you gotta have an MPEG of your best kill, I'll help ya out.
Topic: Answer: Converting your saved SFC games to MPG or AVI (Read 1248 times)