I am dieing to play my PS2 on my projector! The N6 box is a little more than I was looking to spend. I currently have a pretty fast HTPC hooked up to the projector and I need to figure out some way to get svideo or composite to it. I dont really understand how it works, do you open up some sort of tv software you get with the card to get to the svideo input? Any suggestions on what card to buy?

I am using a K-WORLD V-STREAM PCI video capture card.It has s-video and composite in,and is around $20 new.It also comes with PVR-PLUS software.For the price and performance,I love it.It also has a nifty little deinterlacer built in.

This might sound dumb, but do you just run some program to watch it or does it always display whenever the svideo line is plugged in? If it is software is it fullscreen?

Yeah,you just run the software.The PVR-PLUS software that comes with the V-STREAM capture card has a TV tuner program.You can resize the window to any size.You can also set it to full screen and video desktop modes.It also has all the standard video adjustments-brightness,contrast,hue,saturation,sharpness,gamma,etc. It's compatible with dual monitor setups as well.It can also use the video overlay function found on most modern video cards.It works GREAT for my XBOX.I highly recommend it.

If you buy a capture card it should come with software. You can also check out dscaler at www.dscaler.org .
That is a program some people have been using with some success and it is free. It doesn't work with every card though. I have an ATI video card with video in and video out (VIVO) and it works with my card.

David.

I use the ProLink PixelView XCapture card (~$30) and DScaler v4 (free) for satellite TV and Xbox and think this gives good quality for the price. DScaler is the program to use as it offers many de-interlacing algorythms.

If you plan to use PRV functionality, you may want to consider a PRV-150 card as it has hardware MPEG encoding. (this will reduce load on CPU when capturing video)

gs

Funny you mention that, I dropped in my PVR-150 last night and boy does it suck. If you plan on using your PC to do component or svideo do not buy it. Well... you should still buy it because it's hands down the best priced hardware encoding card on the market and it's compatiable with Meedio. However, since it's a hardware encoding card it sucks for playing games on. The computer takes time to encode the video stream into mpeg-2 so everything is delayed 3-4 seconds. Looks like I'll have to buy a cheap-o software encoding card to play my PS2 on.

You shouldn't give up so easily... there is a registry fix for this problem. 0 lag time.

... i'll see if I can't dig up a link, or you can do a search on these forums for the answer.

gs

You can buy video cards from nVidia and ATi that have VIVO (Video In Video Out) that I believe function as frame grabbers basically. The card has to specifically support it though, you can't just make any old card work with it.

The other thing you could do, as suggested, is get a simple frame grabber capture card. I think Hauppage's WinTV Go card is one of these. No encoding. Although I don't know how well they work, they are pretty cheap (<$20 US in most cases).

But definately try the registry fix for your card first.

Yeah, whatever you do, don't buy a card without video inputs and expect it to have video inputs.
David.