How to transfer Amiga video output to pc?

[z5]

I'm looking for ways to capture Amiga screenshots, especially from Amiga demos. The question is, how do i do that?

Winuae is good for that but some demos don't run on Winuae so this is not the solution i'm looking for. Good screengrabbers on Amiga are very rare and besides, most demos shut down the OS so this is not an option either.

So the only solution left, seems to get the Amiga image output to the pc with some kind of video card in the pc.

I have seen entire demos captured that way into divx but the image quality suffers in the process. The question is, does the image quality drop when getting the video signal to the pc or is it because of the heavy compression into divx?

I'm totally new to this so has anyone any experience in getting the Amiga output into a pc with a video card. It would be just to capture screenshots, not to capture entire demos. What quality can i expect when the signal arrives on the pc. Is it possible without any noticable drop in quality?

thanks for help.

[cutaway]

In my experience the loss of quality is normally both because of the amiga output being grabbed in too low a resolution(on the pc) and due to a crappy grabber card and/or cable
I don't think that it is the DIVX compression
if you compress a low res video grab with lots of interferrence then you are sure to get a very bad result.

 :-)

[Effy]

Find somebody with a Vlab image grabber card on Amiga !!! A Vlab/Motion would ofcoz be even better !!

[The_Editor]

I do it all the time  (well, quite often)

You will need a decent ANALOGUE capture card...

Then just wire composite out of your Amiga into Composite IN on your Non linear Capture card !!

Bingo.

You cant really do the "other" choice that I use Because you cant separate frames in the "Demo" ...

That is .. Send each frame over a network and build them up on the pc.

This  

Is a good ANologue & DIgital capture card if your interested.....  THIS  Is the URL

[libz]

For the best (and most expensive) result you need to convert the amiga rgb-signal to YUV. There are professional transcoders which do this. Then you need a good capturecard on the PC which support YUV-signals (beta sp). This gives you the best signal possible from the Amiga, far more superior than a compositesignal.
Then use a good program like Cleaner to convert to div-x.

[z5]

wow, this is getting technical for me  :-o

Who thinks he can achieve perfect/near perfect quality? Is this what i can achieve?Example of original quality screenshots taken with Winuae on pc.

What would be the cost for a complete system?

I used a Pinnacle PCTV RAVE card when I wanted to run my (non-emulated)  Amiga in a window.  I could full-screen this and capture frames directly.  This gives more of a 'screen' feel to the image, and is not perfect quality, but if you;re looking to capture that 'TV' feel, then nothing beats it.  

Apart from that, I'm not sure what else would work, apart from capturring WINUAE screens with the 'printscreen' key.  Pressing this in Windows captures the screen to the clipboard.  All you have to do then is go into a paint program, and 'Paste'.

The best way is to connect the Amiga to the PC via a video capture card (of a TV Tuner one and the same really).

You will need a big and fast hard drive as the best way is to capture the video uncompressed, edit it if need be and then us "off-line" ie not real time, compression. That gives the best output.

To be honest the reason so many divx' are so bad is because people don't take the time to get the settings right for the type of video they are compressing. Take your time, read up on divx (www.divx.com) and make some quality divx!!