Hello,

We have been looking at ways to record the video signal from a computer
with a VGA port. We basically need something like a digital VCR.

One idea that we had was to run a program like Camstudio or Camtasia
on the computer which we want to capture the video. The problems found
with this method were: only about 4 frames per second were captured
where we would like to have ideally at least 15 fps. Also, the CPU processing required slowed down the laptop/notebook such that
the laptop was no longer responsive.

So now we are looking for a solution that will passively take the VGA output and convert it to a file that can be stored to AVI video.

We have used the Archos AV120/AV140 along with a VGA to composite
converter. The VGA->NTSC converter does degrade the quality of
video somewhat. Also the Archos and the DVR100 module only
captures about 320x200 video. This is decent for some applications,
but some video screen has smaller font text which is very important
to to be recorded as to be legible on playback.

I have seen some devices which will take a composite signal
and encode to MPEG2 or even MPEG4/Divx. This is essentially
what the Archos did.

we need a device which is portable (less than a couple lbs) and
has the highest quality of recorded video, and does not signficantly
slow down a host pc which receives the video.

We would eventually like to record this captured video out to
DVD+R with the least amount of effort.

Are there any other "archos-like" video capture devices which capture
higher resolutions?

Thanks.

Mike McWhinney