I need help deciding what capture card I should get. I want a cheap one, but I don't want to waste my money.
Please help.
Depends on what you want - for old yellow/red/white you can go for pretty much any usb2 capture card. For HDMI you should go for a internal card - a good base is the AVerMedia Live Gamer. There are better and/or more expensive cards that would be more future proof - but it's up to you what you buy in the end.
For standard definition capture, I'd go gv-usb2 over everything else. It's only around 40 USD and provides easily the best quality for that price as well as some of the best SD quality. It'll capture regular composite as well as s-video. The driver install is in Japanese, but it's only 1 click so it's not that hard to figure out + guides online can help.
As for HD, you have much more in terms of comparable options, but what HowDenKing said is the best advice - go internal for the best HD quality.
For yellow/red/white I actually have the probably cheapest capture card on earth. The Eazycap. However it's still doing a decent job, despite you can get it for ~10$. Of course it hasn't the best quality but you can still see what's going on. (And if you play old games then the quality won't matter that much anyway) Also the delay is really low actually. So if you'd like to play of your screen and not the TV then you might do so, if you don't play something reaction heavy. Some people say they went into trouble with the drivers, but for me it worked great by just installing whats there on the delivered disc.
It only has two flaws:
- the colors doesn't get shown correctly (saturation is lower then on your TV I'd say)
- if you play for a long time (3-4h +) the audio starts getting de-synced. That's why I just don't capture the audio over the grabber but just have my TV near the mic. This way I never have de-synced audio. Also it is only the audio which does get de-synced. The video is always fine no matter how long I play!
So yeah you might want to fiddle around quite a bit to work with that capture card. But it's doing a really solid job if you should be extremely broke or something. If you only have 10 spare dollars, this is your card to go. (Since it's only 10$ it doesn't hurt too much to get another one, once you have a higher budget.)
@Hdot12 If I had to decide on getting an EZCap, a logilink USB2 or a GV-USB2 I'd personally go for the GV or logilink, both have no desyncing or washed out colours and can be set up just as fast as any other card.
the Logilink one also costs only ~10€ Logilink USB2 (AmazonDE) - 13.74€ EasyCap (AmazonDE) - 14.38€ GV USB2 (AmazonCOM) - 35.93$