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Well, my road trip to Adelaide has be unfortunately been postponed as my friend My Do asked me to stake back to help out with the mini convention which the YSA are having in Melbourne. The mini convention is all next week starting with a carnival themed dance, some service projects and games, Sunday church services, and ending with Temple sessions and some more games; spanning through Friday to Monday. Supposedly this wouldn't be a problem as I'd come for the second half of the convention, but because I have to help set up on Friday now, Adelaide will have to wait. Other than that, I recieved my nifty little video capturing device and have spent most the week trying to get it to work smoothly.
I had been wanting to record from my PlayStation 3 for a while but didn’t want to spend my limited resources on any costly equipment; and also because I’m running out of space to put things.
That’s when I stumbled across the Syntek EasyCAP USB Video Adapter with Audio from USB Geek.
It took me a while to set it up due to lack of instructions but once done, it worked quite well.
EasyCAP runs on RCA Composite and S-Video inputs, and the package will come with instructions for installing drivers with software provided; Ulead Video Editor 10. It also mentions that it comes with a USB extension cord which mine didn’t; so be sure to contact the store you purchase from to double check as I found myself requiring one, which luckily I already had spare at home.
Be sure that you do install the drivers and restart the computer before connecting the adapter also as that is required for it to run correctly.
Unfortunately, all information given, it doesn’t have any instructions on how to use the actual adapter itself. Of course you connect the source to the adapter, however, trying to get it to work with my TV, I could not figure out why no signal was coming through at all. It took me a while to figure out that it only accepted analogue signals thanks to some searching around, and once that was figured, I simply connected the SCART cable that came with the PS3 into my Sony Bravia, then using the RCA composite output jacks, I connected them down into the adapter itself.
This enabled me to switch between HDMI when playing games, and video when I want to record, whilst still able to watch what I’m doing on a larger screen and thus, use the adapter for the first time.
Now, the issue with using analogue signals is that I’m only able to obtain 576i, which I believe is the highest resolution possible. The resolution itself is fine, but the interlaced effect can be a down bringer. Also, the output the PS3 using SCART was only a 4:3 ratio aspect; no widescreen.
With the help of codecs, I was able to de-interlace the signal and resize the resolution to a widescreen format, but at the same time this reduced some sharpness and detail in the image quality.
The codec and program I’m currently using is DivX 6 and Virtual VCR, which is free, as I found the Ulead software to constantly crash on me; which also seems to be a common issue for others.
Virual VCR provides video and audio compression, along with automatic re-syncing which worked very well.
I have the encoding presets at 4 and bitrate at 2560 undergoing 1-pass. My format in is PAL 4:3 and format out is PAL 16:9 with a custom resolution of 720x576. My resize filter is on bicubic (normal) and interlace is set to de-interlace source. Depending on where you live, you will either need to set PAL or NTSC in the Virtual VCR also to receive signals.
What I get is very close to no compression, but with colours a little dull in comparison and slightly pixilated blocks here and there. Audio is great on the other hand maintaining a standard quality.
One final mention is that the audio capture isn’t strong so you do need to put your source on a higher volume.
All in all, for what it’s worth, it does a great job in recording your gaming moments or capturing almost anything you want at a pleasant VCD to super VCD image quality. It’s too bad you have to do it all under 576i which isn’t the prettiest sight and boy, when you switch back to 1080p…
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