Hardware Based Screen Capture?

Sokie asks: "While trying to decide what screen capture software would work best for illustrating software reviews, I realized that there were many possible situations where this software just won't work. For instance, BIOS screens, Linux installs, that kind of thing. Then I got curious as to whether there might be a hardware based screen capture device available. After several searches on AltaVista and Google, I've come up empty." There may be several ways to do this, but it would be interesting to note if there's been a specific product designed for this purpose. Is there an off-the-shelf solution, or would methods like the ole camera-in-front-of-the-monitor trick work?

"What I'm thinking is a pass-through or Y connected external piece of hardware that has some sort of independent storage like a 3.5" floppy or SmartMedia card or something. Ideally, there would just be a button to press on the device that would do a screen capture and save it to the storage medium as a TIFF or similar file. Then there could even be a USB/Serial connection and software for getting the images back off the device at a later time. So does anyone know if this piece of hardware exists? Would this device be enormously complex and prohibitively expensive? Is there any easier/better way to do screen captures in the type of situations I mentioned?"

Comments

Video Capture Cards

[Any_User]

You should be able to get a video card with a TV-Out to show the contents of your screen while in any mode, then just hook the 'out' to a VCR and hit record then pull the screenshot back in off of tape at a later time.

Re:Video Capture Cards

[drig]

Some video out cards (or external boxes) allow for HDTV resolutions. I'm not sure of any off the top of my head, but it may be worth looking into. For simple text screens, that should be good enough.

Hardware screen capture device

[AintTooProudToBeg]

$54.99:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail /g lan ce/-/photo/B00004RFC6/qid=975270105/sr=1-4/105-034 4143-5370351

Capture With Computer

[SEWilco]

Use another computer, with a VGA capture card.

• AccuView Linux mentions an "optional VGA input".
• Video-Capture.Net mentions VisionRGB, although the link for it is not working at the moment.

Re:Capture With Computer

[SEWilco]

I don't remember the signal/ground paths of VGA; some circuit types do not work with a Y cable but I don't remember if VGA is one of those types of circuits. There are splitter boxes which let several VGA monitors be fed from a single input.

Anyway, most video capture boards let you see what you're capturing so you can probably see what the target computer is showing...on the screen of the capturing computer. Of course, you should select a board which lets you see the display in realtime -- if the capture is every 30 seconds and you need to play Doom to capture the desired images then you'll find your Doom character shot between updates...

Re:Capture With Computer

[SEWilco]

Well, apparently VGA can be split with a cable. I was looking for something else and noticed a Y-cable on eBay. Do a search for "splitter monitor" to find current auctions of such items.

Another reason to keep that old dot matrix

[unitron]

It would sure be nice if the 'pause' key worked during boot, but I've never seen a board where it would. I have, however, had a situation where I needed to troubleshoot without any video and the combination of the 'print screen' key and a printer that doesn't need any software loaded sure comes in handy. Of course what prints depends on which fraction of a second in which you hit the 'print screen' key, so it can take several tries.

VMWare

[jon_adair]

This is exactly one of the uses VMWare quotes.