High End, Affordable Capture Card Recommendation

[RGB0b]

I believe I did, but I'll try again today. I assume I'll have to get pretty much every setting right on the "Custom VGA Mode" tab for this to work:

[NJRoadfan]

A few questions

-Was the SNES directly connected to the capture card for those sample videos? (not running thru the OSSC)

-How is your SNES output cable wired for sync?

I doubt the capture device will take composite or S-Video Luma video for sync, its likely going to need CSYNC from pin 3 of the MultiAV or a sync stripper.

[RGB0b]

I tried both directly connecting and through the OSSC. Also, this capture card won't accept anything other then csync, but that's what almost all my cables are wired for anyway (including both SNES cables I was using for testing).

[NJRoadfan]

I haven't forgotten about this. I finally got RGB cables for my SNES and have to build a SCART to HD-15 adapter for this capture card to test (sourcing female SCART plugs in the US is expensive). I did preliminary testing using the XRGB2+ and it appears to capture SNES fine using the default 640x480 VESA profile (outside of the XRGB2+'s infamous shimmering output, but I can't blame the capture card for that!). The card seems to have no problem with the SNES' 60.1Hz refresh. When I get an adapter built, I'll test direct 240p capture.

Surprisingly using the preview window in the Epiphan software to play games didn't seem to add any crazy amount of lag.

[RGB0b]

I found a solution for people who just want to stream SNES video and don't need "perfect" video output:

SNES -> OSSC -> SCART-to-HDMI -> DVI2USB

Using the HDMI input of one of those cheap SCART to HDMI adapters set to 720p made the SNES' x3 output from the OSSC totally compatible with the DVI2USB. If I want to stream, or just take good quality footage, this is definitely good enough, but not for any kind of side-by-side comparison. I still would like to know how to tweak the DVI2USB to be more compatible with SNES. Genesis still works fine though.

As an FYI, this is the box I'm using: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MUNIVRO/

Overall, the quality of this card is still much better then many of the others I've used.

[NJRoadfan]

I finally wired up a VGA adapter. I can get video from the SNES, but it has issues. There is minor 1-2 pixel flagging at the top of the image and there is some noise in the image, check the green mountains in the below video. I can't determine if the source is my hastily built SCART-to-VGA adapter (Velleman SCART plugs SUCK for soldering), my pre-1CHIP SNES (built in late 1991), or my cables. This capture isn't optimal either, I didn't tweak the sampling phase or any of that for a nice sharp capture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bi_TkGojCo

Also, I should note that I didn't get any video on the card with just composite sync wired to the VGA pin 13 (normally H-sync or composite sync), I had to wire in the pin 14(normally V-sync) to composite sync too. My 15khz compatible Toshiba TIMM's VGA input also expected something on the V-Sync line, I didn't get a stable picture until I wired it as above.

EDIT: OK, got some game time in on the TIMM, the video noise isn't present on the CRT, so its likely the capture card is the source of the noise.

[NJRoadfan]

Capture take two!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeJ2dn2YDsI

This time I tweaked the sample rate on the capture card to get pixel perfect results. I also resized down to 256x240 before upscaling to 1280x720, this time using VirtualDub's Resize filter on nearest neighbor. For some reason, AviSynth's PointResize() filter makes the video noise worse! There is still some slight blurring, usually one pixel to the right of a sharp contrast, this is likely the poor RGB output of my pre-1CHIP rearing its ugly head.

[RGB0b]

Capture take two!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeJ2dn2YDsI

This time I tweaked the sample rate on the capture card to get pixel perfect results. I also resized down to 256x240 before upscaling to 1280x720, this time using VirtualDub's Resize filter on nearest neighbor. For some reason, AviSynth's PointResize() filter makes the video noise worse! There is still some slight blurring, usually one pixel to the right of a sharp contrast, this is likely the poor RGB output of my pre-1CHIP rearing its ugly head.

So, you captured in 256x240, then later upscaled it to 1280x720?

[NJRoadfan]

I captured at 512x240, the card won't allow capture below 480 pixels across (video just rolls). I then resized to 256x240 using nearest neighbor which had a side effect of cleaning up most of the faint jail bar noise. After that the video scaled nearest neighbor 3x to 768x720 and pillerboxed to 1280x720 for upload to YouTube.

[paulb_nl]

It seems there went something wrong with scaling it to 768x720. The video height should be 3x224 = 672 but it looks smaller.

[NJRoadfan]

The active video area is 224 lines tall, I didn't crop the blank overscan from the 240 line tall capture.

[Fudoh]

There's something very strange going on with your video.

When downloading your video looks like this:



but when streaming it looks like this and the later one is what paulb_nl meant.



Your video (when downloading) is just 1280x594 instead of 720p.

[NJRoadfan]

Appears to be something going on somewhere on YouTube's end. The source file is 1280x720. Here is a raw frame direct from the file I uploaded.



The file sent was an AVI encoded with ffdshow's x264 module. I might have to switch to encoding with a MPEG4/AVC container. The original capture was 24-bit RGB using UtVideo's RGB VCM codec (fourcc is ULRG).

[paulb_nl]

Since you are capturing pixel perfect from a pre 1-CHIP, would you mind posting a 512x240 png capture of the fullscreen grey ramp from the 240p suite?

I have been able to reverse most of the blur caused by the PPU filter but there are some things that don't make sense which are visible in the grey ramp. It would be helpful to have a pixel perfect capture.

[NJRoadfan]

I don't have access to a flash cart to run the 240p test suite.

Speaking of.... is there any place to recommend additions to the suite? An alternating vertical line test pattern would be useful for those with capture cards or the OSSC to align pixel sampling phase. One test pattern for each of the console's resolutions would be best, for example, a 256x224 and 512x224 pattern for the SNES.