Be Excellent To Each Other

I wasn't happy with how absolutely terrible my captures for Crash 'n' Burn were, so I've gone back and done some research. I've been fiddling about with TV capture software and whatnot and I've come to a conclusion.

My conclusion: DScaler ROCKS. It's software that helps you record and deinterlace video input. It's free and it works.

First up, these EasyCAP USB things aren't so good.



They work in a pinch, and there are drivers for both Windows and Linux but the quality isn't so great. If you look closely at my screenshots for Crash 'n' Burn and Killing Time (inadvisable), you'll notice that there's a shimmery, checkerboard pattern. I mashed up the images afterwards to reduce the effect, but it's still frustrating. (Edit - that might be a 3DO thing)

Even worse, is that there seems to be a number of hardware revisions for the EasyCAP. There's a 'good' one and a 'bad' one, and they're nearly identical. The 'bad' one (which is what I ended up with) has an 8-bit mono audio thing in it so it's telephone quality. The 'good' one has a dedicated chip or something of the sort, which means that it has a reasonable audio quality. The only way to know which one you have is to plug it in and see what happens (there's a probe thing you can do with Linux drivers also to see what chipset it has).

I wanted to have a go at doing a PS2 game and didn't want to waste my time with the lousy EasyCAP thing, so I moved my PS2 next to my spare PC. In it, I have a cheap crappy bt878-based PCI card with a composite input, which I got from a car boot sale. To get the signal out of the PS2 and into the capture card, I've used a lightgun cable. The cable sits plugs into the multi-out port of the PS2 and lies between it and the video to TV cable. The cable itself has a composite video out phono port on it, so it can act as a tap. This set up makes the video signal noisy as hell (specifically, the colour part), but it does work.

With Red Faction and Dynasty Warriors 3 on the PS2 as my test games, here's what I've found.

When I was looking for the drivers for the bt878 card, I found neat replacement drivers for them which didn't install all kinds of crappy Ulead trials or whatever. The other neat thing about these drivers is that they came with a tiny DirectShow video preview application called AMCAP. When I started up AMCAP with the PS2 set up, what I saw was juddery, noisy and had visual mess due to the interlacing. I'm no video buff, so I had no idea what I was doing at this point. I took some screenshots of Red Faction and kept only those that didn't have a lot of motion. [url=[url=http://oi56.tinypic.com/oqvnm1.jpg]]Still, the pictures were all scrambled up and looked really awful[/url]. I figured that this was just the way it was supposed to be.

Not so! A few Google searches showed that folks seem to rely on a program called DScaler. Wasn't exactly sure what it was for, but I figured I'd give it a shot. It gave me the same juddery, noisy image from AMCAP. Looked up what settings other folks use.

MAGIC OCCURRED.

Setting the deinterlace mode to 'Video (Greedy, High Motion)' transformed a juddery mess into proper smooth DW graphics. Turn on the temporal noise filter (press N) and all the colour noise was gone. It was a night and day difference. I've not been so impressed by something in months. I'm sure I could get better results with different cables, not splitting the signal, fiddling with DScaler, setting the input resolution to the correct one, and generally knowing what I'm doing, but right now I've got something that doesn't look like Crash 'n' Burn and that makes me very happy.

before from AMCAP
after from DScaler

before from AMCAP
after from DScaler

A good pic, A goodish pic from DScaler.

An absolutely atrocious pic from AMCAP

I write this thread partly as a reminder to myself if I'm ever in this situation again, and as a cheat mode for other folks who want video but don't want to spend hours screwing around with it. Get DScaler. Turn it on. You're ready.

Now I have to play through all of Red Faction AGAIN to replace a whole deck of screenshots that look like that.

--

Hah. HAH HAH HAH.

For giggles, I decided to see how the PS2 looked when plugged into the EasyCAP. It only goes and looks bloody clear, doesn't it.

It doesn't look as good as the internal card (a Haupaugge WinTV PCI) can at its best, but the images are so noisy that rarely happens.

The EasyCAP's images look a bit strange compared to the PCI card... the resolution might be a bit lower, or maybe the colour depth is out of whack, but the images are rock solid and properly saturated.

You know what this means, don't you?

THE 3DO IS A WASTE OF SPACE IT CAN'T EVEN DISPLAY VIDEO RIGHT AND IT'S RUINING MY LIFE EVEN WHEN I'M NOWHERE NEAR IT AND NOT PLAYING ITS CRAPPY GAMES ARGH ARGH ARGH. And also don't try to use a thirteen year old TV card with a ps2.

Now I have to apologise to my EasyCAP.

Getting this stuff working is nothing less than sorcery... :s


On Windows, the EasyCAP gadget and drivers work intermittently. Plugging it straight into the motherboard without using the included USB extension lead is the only way to get more than a quarter of an hour out of it.

The crap that comes on the disc with the EasyCAP is probably enough to make your computer unusable. When you install it, it puts several exe files into c:\windows\ directory and it likes to call them at odd times. Sometimes when I'm setting up the device, it'll randomly call the still picture program part of it. Yesterday, whenever I plugged it in, the Windows new device dialog appeared as if it were the first time I plugged it in. It stopped coming back after I edited the inf file so that it didn't need the associated crappy Syntek exes. Makes me feel super safe, it does. :(

If you want to test DirectShow or Video For Windows devices quickly, here's AMCAP. It doesn't need installing; all it does is let you pick a device, see what's coming through and record it uncompressed.