I am looking for a good video capture "tuner" that takes S-video and RCA audio or RCA composite video and audio to USB. Basically, I want to be able to hook up my SNES to my laptop and play games on it. So I am not really interested in recording video or watching TV.
Any suggestions?
There are a lot of cheap little USB boxes, but some of them are shitty. I'd suggest taking your computer/laptop to whatever computer store and testing them out, making sure they can capture at a decent resolution. Either that, or make sure wherever you buy from has a decent refund policy.
(Neither of these were possible when I bought a crap capture card in Japan -- refunds are usually unheard of.
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usb input adapters generally produce considerably large ammounts of latency when rendering from composite video. Personally I'd recommend making/using a usb/parallel port adapter for the controllers and emulating the snes. If space is an issue, substitute the tv tuner for a usb flash drive.
Personally if I were in this condition, I'd do some deep searching to see if pcmcia tv tuners are still manufactured, and if so, search for one that is natively supported in other software (DScaler, for example).
I have a Happauge WinTV GO from back in 2001 (and it's still $40 everywhere, what a jip...), and the minimum requirements were a 75MHz processor with mmx. Of course times change, and there's issues like pre-processing, post-processing, rendering delay, and other crap. But this card is natively supported in DScaler, and I have yet to upgrade (the digi input ones are just waay too expensive still).