HDMI and VGA Video Converters

I'm interested in recording gameplay from my computer and I bought two products to try to do this:  a ViewHD HDMI to Composite and a Monoprice VGA to RCA converters.  My hope was to use my DVD recorder to capture computer footage.  The output would only be standard definition, but I'd be mostly interested in recording older computer games.  Software recorders carry significant CPU overhead and I hoped to record video without dropping frames or quality.  Unfortunately, my hopes were dashed after using these two products.

(HDMI to Composite with The Witcher at resolution 800x600.  The colors are darker most likely due to a bad contrast setting.)

The ViewHD's video quality proved sufficient except that it included a copy-protection signal in the composite output.  My DVD recorder added a distorting/banding effect to deliberately ruin the picture.  It connected to a television just fine, but VCRs and DVD recorders were useless.  Oddly enough, a USB composite capture dongle I own displayed the video without the distortion.  Either the hardware itself or VirtualDub ignores the copy-protection signal. As such, the ViewHD could record to a computer, but that defeated the purpose of getting the device in the first place.  It might be possible to find something to strip the signal, but that's an added expense and may not work.  Footage in a 16:9 aspect ratio might work with the converter since the distortion could be cropped out of the video.

Strangely, the ViewHD works perfectly well with a second-generation Apple TV, but won't work at all with an iPhone 4s with iOS 7.  The iPhone seems finicky about which devices it will work with.


(VGA capture footage of The Witcher at 800x600 resolution.  No sound.)

The Monoprice VGA to RCA converter didn't introduce any copyright protection, but its overall quality seemed quite poor.  The right and bottom borders clipped so the image wasn't an exact copy.  These border problems were probably due to over-scanning, but there was no way to fix it despite a switch which claims to do just that.  It definitely receives the whole image since zooming will show the correct border, but for some reason it clips in the normal view.  The device reset once, but refused to do so after the first time.  It seems designed for PowerPoint presentations and not gameplay capture.

The sad part is that with all the money I spent on this little project (due to needed cables and whatnot), I could have purchased a GeForce 650/750 with ShadowPlay recording technology.  It requires a little CPU overhead, but far better than most capture software thanks to the inclusion of an encoder chip.  Since I use a Dell desktop which includes a proprietary power supply, I'd need to purchase a drive bay power supply.  I haven't used either of these products, but my buyer's regret makes me think this is a workable solution.  The biggest problem I can see with this plan is that the graphics card might be too large for my system and that my PCI Express version might be too old.  [Edited 2014-04-29:  That drive bay power supply apparently requires a special type of PSU that it plugs into (for purposes of grounding and whatnot).  However, I also found out that Dell no longer uses proprietary supplies, so swapping one out shouldn't be a problem.  And I discovered that EVGA creates GeForce 750 graphics cards that function on 300 Watt power supplies without six-pin connectors (assuming an Intel processor is used instead of a rather power-hungry AMD).]

For Radeon-oriented users, there's the AverMedia Game Capture HD, but there have been some complains about that one.  It requires a hard drive as well.  This is another product I've yet to use.