The poor man’s guide to top quality game videos

The DVD recorder arrived, and it’s looking good, so here’s what I’ve learned about capturing game videos, based on literally years of experience.

First of all, if you have money it’s easy. Get a fast computer, a fast graphics card (a TV out socket is a nice extra), and buy one of the better screen video capture programs. Or if you’re lucky you may have this stuff anyway. For example, if you have a decent video camera you might be able to record straight to the camera then feed it back to the computer. Experiment!

But what about the rest of us? What if your computer is old, slow, non-standard, has no graphics card, and you really need to capture full screen video at reasonable quality?

Here’s what I recommend.

First, get a VGA to PAL/NTSC video converter box off Ebay. If you shop around you should get one for under £25 including postage, from Hong Kong. If you’re on a tight budget that’s still a lot of money I know, but they’re amazingly useful. Remember all the hassle you have with getting PCI video cards to fit your ancient computer? And then you get the wrong kind of card and it doesn’t fit? Or it doesn’t install properly on your motherboard or the results are disappointing? Well forget all that. This box is simple. You just plug one end into a computer and one end into a TV and voila! Whatever happens on your computer now happens on TV. No installation, just plug it in.

It works with practically every TV and every computer, every operating system… it just works. You can carry it around in your pocket. If you ever want to show something on a giant plasma screen, or save it to VHS or whatever, you Just Do It.  If you’ve ever messed around with computers and video in the real world on a tight budget then you’ll never regret buying one of these.

Second, buy the cheapest DVD recorder you can find. Not the computer kind, the kind that sits on top of a TV and lets you save TV shows onto DVD for watching later.

These days everyone wants tiny slimline models or hard-disk based machines, so you can pick up good quality bulky DVD recorders for about £30 including postage.  Again, this is a lot of money of you’re a pauper, but it doubles as a great birthday gift. Let’s face it, if you’re uber-poor then you probably live with your family and they still use an old VHS recorder, so if you buy them one of these and they’ll love you forever.

That’s all you need to buy (except possibly a couple of cheap cables if you don’t have them already). Then you simply plug the DVD recorder, press ‘record’ and do whatever it is you want to record.

Then when you have a DVD version of the video you just grab the VOB file onto your computer using Auto Gordian Knot or similar. That conversion doesn’t have to take place in real time, so your slow computer is perfectly adequate. You’ll also need some video editing software and a bit of practice, but all those things are available using open source software or freeware or cover disk software. Zweistein/Thugs at Bay is amazing, but has a huge learning curve. Anyway, as a bona fide pauper with an interest in video you will already be familiar with this process.

The point is that this method of capturing video overcomes the biggest problem of capturing video on a tiny budget: quality. Using a TV style DVD recorder ensures you get acceptable quality and a full frame rate at full screen. You simply cannot do that with a cheap computer on its own. But this way actually works.