Playing PS3/360/PS2 games on PC.

[reko_t]

Hello!

Let me start by saying that I don't really care about the capture part of the card so I'm not entirely sure if I'm posting in the correct forum, but here goes anyways.

What I really want to do is simply play with my consoles on my monitor. The issue I have atm is that my monitor (HP LP3065 30") doesn't support other native resolutions than 2560x1600 and 1280x800, which unfortunately do not work with my gaming consoles (plus it has no analog inputs anyway for PS2). So plugging the consoles directly to my monitor is not an option without an external HD upscaler or such, which is a solution I don't really even want (reason mentioned later on the post).

What I use at the moment is Terratec Grabby for capturing the video input via S-Video from PS3/PS2, and then use DScaler to display the video on my screen and play that way. It works very well, except I'm not happy with the analog signal quality. So I'm looking for a solution that lets me do something similar for 720p/1080i/1080p in cheapest way possible (I have few hundred bucks to spend on this, so go nuts though). I don't really mind if I don't get 1080p, 720p/1080i would really be enough for me.

Now keep in mind that I don't care about video capturing at all, and I don't want to play my games through some bloated capturing software. I want something simple and easy-to-use like DScaler, that doesn't bloat the window with any controls. I simply want the display from the gaming console on my screen, similar to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5RcCCJnXek

If possible, I don't want to buy any HD upscaler to plug my consoles to my display via another port, because I really like the idea of my games just being another window on the operating system, so I can do other things while I play the games (browse the internet, chat with my friends on MSN and IRC, etc).

I've tried looking into some solutions, but I really have no luck finding what I want. To conclude this post and to show what I'm after the most, I'll list what are the most important features to me (these aren't requirements, just preferred things):

- Simple as possible interface, something similar to DScaler, but must support HD, and hopefully progressive modes too.
- All I really want from the hardware is to pass through the signal, and then some software to display it. That's all. The hardware or software does not need to support anything special aside from making this possible.
- It'd be nice if it supported multiple inputs, so I could plug many of my consoles in it without complex cable management or separate switchboxes. Even if it had just one component input and one s-video, that'd be great, so I can plug my PS3/PS2 on it at the same time. But if I can throw 360 in the mix as well, even better!

Hopefully someone here knows a solution sufficient for me, I've spend countless of hours trying to find a solution, but no alas no luck so far. Thanks for your patience and time, I'm eagerly waiting for some guru to shed some light on this issue for me!

EDIT. Forgot to mention that the capture card does *not* have to support HDMI, as I know there are plenty of issues with PS3/360 due to HDCP protection. Component in is more than sufficient for my needs.

Regards,
Reko TIira

[Brad]

You might consider the AVerMedia AVerTV HD DVR. You could hook up the 360 to HDMI, PS3 to component, and PS2 to S-video I guess. The included software is kinda lame but I don't consider it bloated at <100MB.

You may or may not encounter lag issues since you're wanting to play and display in realtime. It's enough to throw me off on faster note passages in Rock Band.

[reko_t]

You might consider the AVerMedia AVerTV HD DVR. You could hook up the 360 to HDMI, PS3 to component, and PS2 to S-video I guess. The included software is kinda lame but I don't consider it bloated at <100MB.

You may or may not encounter lag issues since you're wanting to play and display in realtime. It's enough to throw me off on faster note passages in Rock Band.

Thanks for the reply. That seems pretty good, and is probably just what I need (I was considering the BlackMagic Design Intensity Pro before, but it's twice as expensive! Now my only worry is the software. After reading some customer reviews and such, many mention that the software that comes with it is flaky at best, and I have bad experience with the bundled in software of capture cards, not only because they're unnecessarily bulky, but because they have bad quality software scalers etc.

Do you happen to know any software like DScaler that supports high definition? One of the things I want to be able to do is hide all the interface aside from the actual window where I'll see the video from the gaming console, similar to what you can do with DScaler, or eg. TerraTec's Home Cinema.

[Brad]

Does DScaler not support HD then? I've never used it. The AVerMedia application actually does hide all of its interface when you double-click and leave the mouse away from it (the controls auto-hide, so they pop up when you mouse back). I think the scaling with this software is bilinear done by your video card since it uses the regular Overlay. It doesn't look good in my case as I have a cheap 4350 video card.

[reko_t]

Yeah, the maximum resolution DScaler supports is like 576i, and it does not support progressive mode at all. It sounds good though, but one issue I have with overlay is that at least some apps I've tried turns off aero off while using it (including DScaler, have to use Direct3D to have aero enabled at same time).