> To expand on Larry's explanation, your PC has to convert the incoming > analog signal from your Playstation to a compatible digital signal the > PC understands, and then pipe it through your video card, before it can > be displayed on your monitor. This is expensive processor-wise if an > encoder is not built onto the capture card. And, if the card has an > encoder to lighten the load on your processor, then you suffer the delay > while it is written to disk. This would likely make your Playstation > games unplayable.
That is one thing that surprised me about my newer capture card. The software that comes with it has no option to turn off the buffer so it makes the games unplayable. But using alternative software bypasses that and makes it perfect again. But both of the old analog ones I had took care of turning the analog signal into a digital stream. No compression, but that also means nothing needs to be decoded. In fact, I think any capture card by definition has to turn the analog into digital. It's the compression that takes the extra power. If the capture card can directly hand off the frames to the video output card then it doesn't take much CPU power at all. The heavy lifting for simple live viewing is already done by the capture card. If you want to do PVR stuff is the only place you need more power. But neither one of them had any noticeable delay. They worked wonderfully for any game playing. And both of the analog cards I got were fairly old tech when I got them years ago. They weren't all that much money even then. Erik _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
