Hello Halo fans. I was wanting to construct a Halo machinima or two. The problem is, I don’t want to spend any money. Mainly because I just want to do this as an inexpensive hobby. Here is what I got to work with:
A laptop, running Windows 7
An HDMI and component TV (I use an HDMI cable on it)
An Xbox 360 (duh)
And a box full of almost every average computer wire imaginable.
Now I was wondering, what can I make with these tools. Also, is there any free software I can use for the situation? Remember, I’m trying not to purchase any hardware.
tl;dr: The reason why you need to purchase capture cards is because unlike audio, analog (component) or digital (HDMI) video is made of complex modulated signals, a capture card is capable of reading these modulations, and converts the input into either an avi file if it’s a standalone box like the AVerMedia Game Capture HD (of which I use and is quite reliable and a must have) or an adapter which is essentially a graphics card for a PC tower, except in reverse because it takes input instead of outputting data.
Unless you’re a tech whiz capable of scratchbuilding the adapter on a computer electronics master degree scale, you will not be able to make an adapter which can translate the signals from your console to be readable by your laptop. To do so you’d need to understand how to wire PCB circuit boards with chips and everything else that makes a computer graphics card work.
You’re just better off buying a capture card. You can find them cheap (like the AVerMedia that I mentioned) for about $150 on Ebay.