Capturing screen and computer sound to DV Camcorder.

[tgp1994]

Hi there everyone, I have a little question that seems so possible I'm surprised no one else has asked about it, or tried to make it work. I would like to be able to capture my computer's screen and sound, in real time, to my DV camera. My options are Firewire, usb, and S-Video. So does anyone know how I can do it?

[JohnnyMalaria]

A couple of options come to mind:

1. There is a DirectShow filter you can trial that converts the desktop into DV. Used with GraphEdit, you can construct a DirectShow "graph" that will take the DV from the filter, add the computer's sound and send the whole lot as DV to your camcorder via FireWire. But the frame rate will most probably be terrible.

2. If your graphics card has a secondary output with an S-video option (many do) then connect the output of that to your camcorder's analog video input and your PC's audio output to the camcorder's analog audio input.

Given you need for real-time, I'd strongly recommend #2 for performance and simplicity.

Don't forget, whatever you are doing, you will end up with 720 x 480 resolution.

[tgp1994]

Thank you very much for your help so far.

I will be trying the DX Software Development kit, as for 2, I have actually done it before, only the receiving end was another computer. I have a little cord that converts S-Video and Analog R-Y-W into USB and Audio in, and it was great, only it was a desktop pc sitting on the other side of the room. I don't really want to bring it over to my side again. And my graphics card does have S-Video, and I do have a camera with something related to S-Video, but unfortunately it is only S-Video out for it.

If you have any more suggestions, those would be great

P.S. Say I had the video record to a different hard drive in my computer, could that possibly increase the performance of software screen capture tools?

[JohnnyMalaria]

The bottleneck isn't the writing to disk - it's the grabbing of the screen and compression to DV.

BTW, the DX SDK no longer contains the DirectShow stuff. It's part of the Platform SDK (or Windows SDK depending which you download).

If you do go the screen capture route, drop the resolution as low as you can (800 x 600 or 640 x 480). This will significantly reduce the processor load. Also, you might want to try GraphEdit before jumping into programming so that you can get an idea of the performance you can expect without the nightmare of writing a filter graph.

[tgp1994]

Ok, thanks. I have been trying graphedit for a bit, so how exactly would I export it to my camera again?

[JohnnyMalaria]

In the list of filters you'll see 'Video Capture Sources'. There should be an entry 'Microsoft DV Camera and VCR' (or something like that) and will be in pink. Add this to the graph and use the left hand input pin. The output pins aren't used.