This question from Gerald Erickson came in for ExtremeTech editor Loyd Case:
In your article titled "Quadra-Screen," you said that to pipe a TV signal to an NTSC monitor, you need a video capture card to route the TV signal into the PC and out to a monitor.
I need to do the opposite. I want to capture what is on my computer screen and record to VCR, DVD, or hard drive. I cannot figure this out after spending a lot of time on the problem. I bought a video card with a TV-out feature but cannot get it to record on a VCR.
See Loyd's reply after the jump:
Loyd's reply:
The problem here is trying to capture what's going on on-screen while simultaneously recording it to hardware via the video output on your video card. One approach is to use a standard PC monitor and set your graphics card for dual-display mode, with the other "display" being the video recorder. The problem with this is that your graphics card may not recognize the recorder.
What you want to do takes a combination of hardware and software.
On the software side, you need an application that will capture the screen activity as it occurs, then write it out to a video file. I pinged Neil J. Rubenking, who writes the Ask Neil software troubleshooting column. He suggested either SnagIt or Camtasia, both from TechSmith (www.techsmith.com). I've also used HyperCam from Hyperionics (www.hyperionics.com) with some success.
Once you get the video file created, you can either burn a DVD using your PC, record it on an external consumer-recordable DVD drive, or record out to a VCR. If you want to burn a DVD on your system, you'll need a DVD burner in your PC, or you can use a USB-connected DVD burner. A PC DVD recorder should come bundled with the right software to enable you to create basic DVDs that can play in a consumer DVD player.
If you're using Vista, you can burn the DVD using Vista's own Windows DVD Maker utility.
Most video outputs built into graphics cards are ill suited for outputting high-quality video to a VCR or a consumer DVD recorder. If you're really set on outputting the resulting video to a VCR, I'd suggest investing in an external converter box that will take a VGA signal from the graphics card and convert it to NTSC video. These can range in price from under $100 to many thousands of dollars for professional-grade units. But burning a DVD on your
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June 21, 2008 10:45 AM
I have a similar problem. I have a panasonic DVD recorder connected to a PC via the input AV3 input terminals on the DVD recorder( l and r phone leads for audio and S Video for the picture).
I have tried playing a a video recording from my computer and recording it on my DVD recorder's hard drive
The result is the audio is recorder but not the picture - where am I going wrong.
Your help will be much appreciated
Regards T
revor
June 21, 2008 10:48 AM
I have a similar problem. I have a panasonic DVD recorder connected to a PC via the input AV3 input terminals on the DVD recorder( l and r phone leads for audio and S Video for the picture).
I have tried playing a a video recording from my computer and recording it on my DVD recorder's hard drive
The result is the audio is recorder but not the picture - where am I going wrong.
Your help will be much appreciated
Regards T
revor