Computer Hope

Hardware => Hardware => Topic started by: comda on November 27, 2014, 11:15:51 AM

Title: RCA in to PC
Post by: comda on November 27, 2014, 11:15:51 AM
Greetings CH!

As as university student with a very low budget but workable one. I want to have a PCI card in my Pc that will let me use a RCA on it. Like the guys in the dorms brought large televisions to play some games on the weekend and having a decent 19' monitor i thought why cant i have card that will allow me to stream RCA input through my computer using my screen? Like the old power macintosh Systems did it. So what are these cards called where can i get one and what will it cost me? I want to plug my old Xbox and maybe NES into it to enjoy a game or two on the weekends.

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Title: Re: RCA in to PC
Post by: DaveLembke on November 27, 2014, 12:25:22 PM
RCA is not high definition, so the quality would be lacking. Video capture cards are what allow for an analog RCA video/audio input to a computer, so that the computer can display whatever is being played to it over the analog RCA connection.

I have 2 capture cards one of which is USB connected to computer and the other is a PCI internal card. Both of them cost around $40 each and while they are great for converting some old 8mm movies from my 2003 sony camcorder to digital to make AVI or MP4 files, the quality of these is lacking.

Additionally i tried using a game system connected to these and the problem is that the refresh of them is so poor that gaming controls lag to that of the joystick and what you see, such as I have one of those Atari 2600 joysticks that came out about 9 years ago where you power it off of 4 x AA batteries and it plugs into a TV normally through RCA analog connection. When connected to a TV everything is fine and fast and responsive, but when connected through the capture card, there is lag between what the card takes in as input and displays that then to the computer display.

To rule out computer lag, i even tried this on a 2nd system of mine which was more powerful a quad-core system vs the dual-core system and the symptoms of the lag in refresh and information from the game system to the display was due to the capture devices and not the speed of the system.

If you want to play video games that were intended for a TV I'd look at getting a RCA to HDMI converter box and then passing that to a newer flat screen display or TV with HDMI that has a HDMI input directly that can be shared with the desktop computer.

If you want to just be able to record your gaming, then you can go the route of the cheap capture card, but the quality will be poor unless you can fork out hundreds of dollars for a really good studio quality card. If the games can be played on the computer itself and you want to record them you can use a software such as FRAPS to record them and then VirtualDub to compress the raw video files from say 27GB uncompressed raw video files into 1.5GB AVI or MP4 files to post to youtube etc, which is what I do for online gaming with friends.

How large is your budget before I go suggesting hardware for you, and does your current display have HDMI input or not?