Exporting computer screen to tape

[grimmeissen]

I'm having problems when trying to export the picture on my computer screen to a VCR or DVD recorder. I have an ATI Radeon 8500 DV and I just can't seem to get burning DVDs to turn out right, so I wanted to try and export one the old fashioned way by just hooking up a DVD Recorder to the outputs on the card, turning on the television display, and recording what was on the screen.

I can get the recorder to easily record what is on the screen, but I have one problem. Whenever the "television" mode is selected in the display properties, no media players will play anything back on the screen. The desktop will show on the exported video, but if I try to open Windows Media Player, a DVD player, or anything else, it just shows up black and plays the audio.

Is there no way I can just turn the TV Out setting on and play an AVI file full screen to just get a copy of the video off of the screen? I've done this on another machine in the past, so hopefully there is just a setting I'm missing or something. I know this is not a great way to copy the videos off, but it's a nice temporary solution until I get better at encoding DVDs.

Thanks,

-Dustin Grimmeissen-

[Baldrick]

Set the tvout as the primary display.

[JimJohnD]

I have done some training videos using something like what I think you want. First the DVD res. is only 720X480 so you will want to drop your computer res to 640X480. It's small but it worked for my purposes. I took the s-video out of the back of my laptop into the video in on my Sony DSR-PDX10 camera and recorded from there. Once I had all the footage I needed I transfered it back to the computer by firewire. The bigest snag was having to drop to such a low computer res. but if you want to be able to read anything on the screen it really is required. If you just want to give the overall look of the screen 800X600 looks OK but reading the fonts will drive you crazy. You need to use the s-video out and not the composite video connection. S-video is WAY cleaner for being able to read text on the screen. BTW I am using the same video card on my "video maker" system with the componet adapter going to a Sony 50" LCD TV as my monitor and the recorded video works great. I would think just about any camera that takes a s-video input will work for you because you are not using it's optics so you don't need a top dollar setup.

Good Luck

[Cornucopia]

Try this:

Temporarily reduce resolution to 640x480(NTSC)
Start MediaPlayer, but keep stopped
Switch to FULLSCREEN mode and play
-or-
Turn off DirectShow accelleration

Also what all the previous posters have said.

Personally, I'd rather take PrintScreens and use Photoshop to get them to the correct aspect ratio, etc. Then use VCDEasy, TMPEGEnc, etc to make MPEG I-frame stills. Then do user-advanceable still-show in Maestro, etc. Works for me.

What app are you using to convert?

Scott

[grimmeissen]

I'm using Adobe Premiere to design the videos and I've been using Nerovision 3 to compile the videos to a DVD. I've just not been completely happy with the way they come out. The video comes out perfect, but then sometimes the playback will bounce around. I wanted to record the video out as a temporary solution until I get better at compiling the DVDs.

As soon as I get to my computer I will try out the 640x480 trick. In the past I've just used the "Print To Video" feature in Premiere to display videos on the full screen so I can record them, but for some reason after I got a digital camera and started editing digital video, the print to video just plays black.

Thanks for the help guys.