Cheap tv tuner or vivo card for connecting gamecube to computer.

[Cheesetogo]

Could someone recomend me a cheap card that I can use to connect my gamecube through componet video to my computer so I can play it on my monitor?

 

[otispunkmeyer]

if you have a LCD i wouldnt bother

a 640x480 interlaced image is gonna look like ass.....i know because thats how my PS2 looks

 

[Cheesetogo]

it'll look beter than my 13" piece of junk tv.

 

[Cheesetogo]

bump

 

[L00PY]

Originally posted by: otispunkmeyer
if you have a LCD i wouldnt bother

a 640x480 interlaced image is gonna look like ass.....i know because thats how my PS2 looks

I have a LCD and PS2 games through component look decent (say FFX-2) to great (480p Tekken 4) to awesome (GT4 in HD).

But back to the original question, you won't find a cheap TV tuner / vivo card with component inputs -- they tend to run from a couple of hundred of dollars to a grand or so. Tuners with composite inputs are cheaper but most of them have a slight lag that makes most game play unbearable.

You'll be better off sticking with computer games + LCD and console games + TV or upgrading the LCD / TV.

 

[Peter]

No component input on your normal TV card, SVideo at best. E.g. on Lifeview's FlyTV Platinum, $38 on newegg. Lets you view TV as well.

The deinterlacing and resolution upscaling will be done by your graphics card's video rendering engine. It won't look THAT bad - although good monitors tend to reveal how low-resolution game console graphics actually are.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Peter
No component input on your normal TV card, SVideo at best. E.g. on Lifeview's FlyTV Platinum, $38 on newegg. Lets you view TV as well.

The deinterlacing and resolution upscaling will be done by your graphics card's video rendering engine. It won't look THAT bad - although good monitors tend to reveal how low-resolution game console graphics actually are.

Actually, the bigger problem will be that many capture boards, and/or the video processing hardware on your video card, will introduce an oh-so-slight-yet-incredibly-annoying lag in the video feed. It basically makes any fast-action games (shooters, sports games, fighting games) unplayable.

Get a standalone component->VGA transcoder (a so-called "VGA Box" like the Nexus model) and use that instead. It will give you a clean, lag-free 640x480 VGA output that you can plug directly into a computer monitor.

 

[Peter]

True. However, the lag is not noticeably there if it's a PCI card _and_ you're running direct-to-overlay mode. You'll be a frame or two behind, no more, with the graphics engine smoothing things out on the current frame on the fly. The more software filtering and deinterlacing you enable, the bigger the lag will become.

I do a lot of console gaming through PCI TV onto big old CRT monitors; I do notice that in arcade shooter games, my performance does suffer when I choose a sophisticated filter over plain deinterlacing.