A few questions concerning capture cards!

1. Can you use it on a Sony Bravia TV?
2. What's the best one that I can upload to an iMac?

I want to do a serties on Youtube. I want to use a capture card on my ps2 tv and upload it to an iMac.

Most capture cards act as a TV in and of themselves, so what kind of TV you own really doesn't matter since you're going to essentially be connecting your PS2 directly to your computer.

I think he's referring to one of those easycap usb things, actually. People sometimes mistakenly call them Capture Cards.

SeanWJF said:

I think he's referring to one of those easycap usb things, actually. People sometimes mistakenly call them Capture Cards.

The difference?

FranticFatality said:

The difference?

Not many, at least not compared with cheap capture cards.

Capture cards are usually internal (PCI or PCI express cards for desktop), have an on-board TV tuner in addition to composite and s-video inputs and (more expensive ones) have hardware MPEG2 or even MPEG4 encoding. Some really expensive ones function two-way (they also output video signal).

Cheap ones lack hardware encoders and don't have built-in TV outs (or built-in audio capture, so you have to use your computer's sound card with a bypass cable). USB ones tend to be more like cheap cards but without even a tuner (they just have composite and s-video inputs, if you are lucky, although I have one that also has its own audio capture hardware). For the rest, they are the same as internal cards: essentially a high-speed ADC circuit that samples video signals instead of audio, and uses the power of your CPU to do any actual work with it, such as compressing, editing and saving it to disk.

From what I understood you want to make videos of your PS2 playing and treat your computer as a big VCR of sorts. For that purpose, you can use any capture card that has a composite or S-Video input and connect the PS2 there.

For best recording quality, I'd use the S-Video output, if possible. It's possible to keep the PS2 connected to both the TV and the capture card (or VCR) if you use different outputs for (e.g. capture card with S-Video, TV with composite or SCART connector) so you can watch what you're recording on the TV.

You can skip connecting to the TV altogether, since you usually can preview what you are recording on the computer screen with practically all video recording software, so you don't really need a second screen/monitor unless you want your room to feel like a TV studio ;-)

Will this work with an iMac though? If not, what do you recommend?

iMacs only have USB 2.0 connectors and (maybe?) some internal mini-PCI ones. Your best bet is to buy a USB 2.0 capture card that explicitly says that it has Mac drivers/support. I assume that in such a case, it will "just work".

This one seems to do the trick:

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/Home+Video/Studio+Family/Video+Capture+for+Mac.htm

but it doesn't look particularly cheap (has hardware encoding). On Windows systems, you can get some nasty cheap stuff like this:

http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/SilverCrest_USB_2.0_Video_Grabber_VG_2000

which kinda works, but I suspect it would take too much effort or be impossible to use with a Mac. If money isn't an issue, go for the sure thing.

If it's above $80 or so, I'd consider getting a standalone video DVD recorder and save yourself a lot of trouble and complications. That's what the AVGN uses ;-)