[Capture] Cabinet to Live Gamer Portable?

[Zero1]

Hey guys!
Before anyone shouts out, "XRGB mini!", I already have one. My personal capture setup for cabinet to PC is:
Smallcab JAMMA to SCART PCB >(SCART)> XRGB Mini >(HDMI)> Extremecap U3.

Since I upgraded my capture card to the Extremecap U3, a friend of mine bought my old Live Gamer Portable, and now he is wanting to capture from cabinet. The thing is that an XRGB mini is a sizable chunk of money to drop just for capture purposes, so we were hoping to find something cheaper.

When I had the Live Gamer Portable, and before I bought an XRGB mini, I tried to capture using a cheap SCART to HDMI box (This one to be exact). I tried pretty much everything I could think of, but I could not seem to lock on to a usable image. It just rolled around, like it wasn't holding sync or something?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2PvnLPKJ18#t=1m05s. The weird thing was that it appeared fine on the TV and worked no problems with an Elgato card. From what I've seen on the web, a few other people have also had this problem.

Anyway, the natural course of action would be to find a different unit, but everything I keep coming across looks to be just rebranded or even repackaged stuff, with all the inputs and outputs suspiciously in the same location. I cannot seem to find another cheap SCART to HDMI box that looks to be of a different design.

So the first thing I'd like to ask is if anyone has had any good experiences with cheapo SCART to HDMI upscalers with a Live Gamer Portable?


Ok, so I thought about coming at this from a different angle... The capture card also has component in, so now I'm looking into getting a SCART to Component box, so the capture chain would be Cabinet>SCART to Component > Live Gamer Portable. I've found some converters that I reckon should work, and apparently the firmware has been updated to support 240p input, but I also came across some SCART to Component cables. Literally just cables, with no visible processing. Now I'm not that familiar with Component, but is RGB over component a thing? I'm now wondering if I can get a SCART to Component cable, and just pump the RGB signal from the SCART straight into the Live Gamer Portable pretty much, or must it be converted to Y Pr Pb?

The cables I've seen are SCART one end with 3 phono on the other (RGB). I'm assuming the sync signal is mixed in with the green out (so sync on green)? Or are these cables just weird niche things for weird TVs that did component over SCART or something?

Cheers.

[DarkAries]

You are in luck. The Live Gamer Portable, so long you have the first version and not the Lite version, handles 240P over component. This means if you wire up the RGB output from the cab, over to RCA jacks or a scart cord, then use SCART to YUV convertor from ebay, you will get native 240p capture. I've done it with consoles, not my cab yet. I'll probably actually try that out later. Concept should be the same though. I've also read up on other forums that people do use that convertor for their DIY superguns so.

[Zero1]

Yep, it's the original LGP. That's good to hear then.

So it would seem that we can go Cab > SCART > SCART to YUV > LGP and that will give you 240p capture.

The one thing I haven't cleared up yet is if we could totally do away with the SCART to YUV converter, and say wire the cab output to RCA and put that directly into the LGP (which would be RGB in - I thought component supported RGB as input too?). I expect pure RGB would not work, so you'd probably have to wire the sync signal to the green jack?

Anyone know?

[DarkAries]

RGB and Component are not compatible. RGB means it's a grayscale image of just the colour, you combine the three to get full colour, and sync is to well sync, YPBRPR is b/w , then Pb is everything minus blue, Pr is everything minus red. The tv figured out everything minus green based on those three things. But yeah you need the convertor. Also if I messed up how component works....

[Zero1]

No, I think you're right. Just I do vaguely recall that some RGB monitors could also accept YPbPr too? I was just clutching at straws that the Live Gamer Portable might be able to do RGsB over component.

Now that's cleared up, I have a decision to make. Whether SCART to YUV > LGP is better or worse than just using S-video to an S-video capture card.

The issue is that the LGP has internal H.264 compression, which means the already tiny 240p resolution will get hit by chroma subsampling - so I'm now wondering if an uncompressed S-video capture dongle would actually look better (lossless S-video in, upscaled to 720p then compressed).

I'm leaning towards the S-video capture actually. I don't think there will be much in it quality wise?

[Fudoh]

Maybe DarkAries could clarify what "native 240p" on the LGP means. On the Elgato - while they recognize 240p and record it without applying deinterlacing), 240p gets recorded as 480p30.

[Zero1]

Maybe DarkAries could clarify what "native 240p" on the LGP means. On the Elgato - while they recognize 240p and record it without applying deinterlacing), 240p gets recorded as 480p30.

I would need to test to be sure, but I have heard that the LGP got a firmware update to allow 240p. Previously the lowest resolution is supported was 480p.

From googling around it seems it does record at 720x240

Also regarding my comment about S-video, totally forgot that would give 480i, so maybe SCART to YUV is still the way forward.

[Zero1]

I was reading in the comments, and the guy who posted the video suspects it's because the upscaler outputs NTSC 4.43 but the LGP only supports NTSC_M.

I thought that would have produced a black and white image rather than the rolling issue. But I guess now the search for a SCART to HDMI converter that outputs NTSC_M is on.

[Unseen]

But I guess now the search for a SCART to HDMI converter that outputs NTSC_M is on.

There is no such thing. HDMI does not have any notion of PAL or NTSC color encoding, it only carries RGB oder YCbCr video data.

[Zero1]

Damn. So does anyone know the actual reason why these generic boxes don't work with the LGP, but work fine on TV and with other capture cards?