Video capture card help! How do you capture from video card (desktop)?

[AtiMike]

Hello VideoHelp.com gurus!

I recently bought an MSI ATI Theater 650 Pro video capture card / TV tuner. I'm new to the whole field of capture cards.. I may have misunderstood, but I thought my video capture card would allow me to capture the video of my 8800 GTX. I've been trying to capture my video output of gaming (FPS shooters) to then encode it in Flash (using Flash Media Encoder) and stream it to www.justin.tv (Flash video streaming site).

Now the most popular method of doing this is using a software like Camtasia Studio and recording like that.. but I thought instead of wasting CPU cycles to record my desktop, I'd buy a video capture card and off-load the capturing to the video capture card processor.

However having installed the MSI ATI Theater 650 Pro and messing around for the last few hours.. I can't figure out how to capture my desktop (a.k.a. video output from my 8800 GTX). I understand the capture card has inputs for S-Video, Composite and what not.. I thought maybe it could record based off PCI bus as well or something.

So perhaps I'm just a total amateur and misunderstood all along.. is the only way to capture your desktop video using a software like Camtasia? Can a video capture card not do it? If it can, what method do I have to take? My video card and capture card both have S-video inputs.. if I got a male/male S-video cable and just connected the two cards is that a viable method to record video from my video card?

Thanks to all who can help this newbie!

[Baldrick]

Have you tried Fraps or D3DGear? They are designed for capturing games.

And yes you can capture using two video cards and two computers, use the svideo and set the primary monitor to the svideo-output on the gaming machine and capture on the other. But If you have a fast enough computer you may may get better results using fraps.

[AtiMike]

Hm.. Fraps or other such programs slow my PC down too much. I want to record game play but without hindering my performance (FPS) too much if at all.

I basically am looking for the most true way to capture video from my video card in a hardware solution, not software that will bog down my machine.

I found a S-Video cable and connected my video card to the capture card, then set my Nvidia settings to use S-Video as 2nd screen. This effectively let me record what would be on my 2nd monitor, or my primary monitor if I set Nvidia to clone mode.

Of course the problem with S-Video is it being limited to 1024x768 standard def, whereas my monitor displays natively at 1680x1050, which is the resolution I want to capture video at.

So right now I'm thinking I need a HD capture card such as Blackmagic Intensity:
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/

Though my video card doesn't have HDMI input, I could get a DVI/HDMI cable and connect my video card to the Intensity card and then perhaps record video at 1680x1050? Maybe..

[jagabo]

So right now I'm thinking I need a HD capture card such as Blackmagic Intensity:
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/

Though my video card doesn't have HDMI input, I could get a DVI/HDMI cable and connect my video card to the Intensity card and then perhaps record video at 1680x1050? Maybe..

You'll need a separate computer for the recording because the Intensity uses the CPU to compress the video (uncompressed HD video will be too disk intensive). If you try to do this one computer the game and then Intensity will be fighting for CPU time.

If you can get component video out of your computer you may be able to use the Hauppauge HD PVR. It is a USB2 hardware h.264 encoder. The included software displays while it captures and consumes a fair amount of CPU time. But there is alternate recording software which just receives the USB stream and saves it to a file.