Recording any Computer Using an RGB Capture Card

While VNC is a piece of software for broadcasting your desktop onto another machine, there are hardware solutions out there that can do it much more expediently. Using an RGB capture device (often referred to as a “frame grabber”), you can take any VGA input and display it in a window on your Windows PC. What does this mean for you? It means that you can capture the video output from any machine that supports VGA output (and virtually all of them do). Using a hardware solution sports the following advantages over software like VNC:

• It tends to be faster. Depending on the specifications of the hardware, you might not notice a lag of any sort. Most cards will post benchmarking results that show how many frames per second you can expect at a particular resolution. Even lower-end cards can handle resolutions of 640 x 480, 800 x 600, and even 1024 x 768 at a minimum of 10 fps, which for our needs is perfectly acceptable.

• There is no configuration needed on the source machine whatsoever. Once you’ve installed the software and got the system working on the client side, it will continue working, no matter how many different computers you end up connecting to it.

• Because all it requires from the source is a VGA output stream, you can hook up just about any computer imaginable to it. And it doesn’t stop with desktop computers, either. Game consoles, medical devices, and scientific equipment with VGA output can be captured just as easily. I have also heard of people using third-party conversion cables to put VGA outputs on their personal digital assistants (PDAs) as well as handheld gaming devices, meaning that these could be captured, too.

But it’s not all sunshine and roses in FrameGrabber Land, either. As with anything, there’s a flip side. Here are some disadvantages of which you’ll want to be aware:

• It’s expensive, especially when compared to the cost of software like VNC (which is approximately $0). Expect to pay anywhere from $400 to $2,500, depending on specs.

• Most of these devices are PCI cards, which will require you (or someone perhaps a bit more qualified than you) to open your machine and install it. However, I have seen some frame grabbers advertised that convert the VGA signal to USB 2.0, and since all the hardware is external in this case, no such tinkering would be necessary.

• Unlike the DVI output found on most newer video cards, VGA is an analog standard, not digital. As such, the color output can be somewhat inconsistent. For example, when viewed in a window on the destination monitor, what is supposed to be a solid block of color might in fact develop subtle color gradations that will really throw the TSCC codec into a tizzy, thus bloating the file size. While I have seen DVI-based capture cards that might not have this problem, keep in mind that DVI output on computers is still nowhere near as common as VGA, and the range of devices with which you could use the card’s digital input are therefore limited.

Performing the capture is relatively simple. Just take a standard monitor cable (usually included with these devices), plug one end into the monitor port on the computer you want to record, and plug the other end into the VGA port of the capture device. Install and launch the included software on your Windows machine, and poof! A window appears on your Windows monitor that shows the desktop of the other machine. This window can be recorded just like a VNC window can, so please consult the VNC getting started guide in the previous section for details in setting up the Camtasia Recorder to capture it.