You know how computer upgrades go: the new gaming machine displaces the old gaming machine, the old gaming machine becomes the new capture machine, and the old capture machine gets parted out and sold piecemeal to finance the initial purchase. It's a story as old as time.
But, a couple of upgrades ago I decided that I would jump on the small computer bandwagon. I kind of fell in love with the Mini-ITX computer scene. They take up less room, so I can cram more in the same space, and it's kind of nice to have some project computers around to experiment on.
But the Mini-ITX computers come with a huge caveat: very few peripheral slots, i.e. usually one, and that's taken up by my video card. That means that the old capture device I was using, the venerable MTVHDDVRR, was no longer a viable choice. I had gotten a USB capture device for the modern consoles, the Live Gamer Portable 2, which I'm still fiddling with, but, crucially, it doesn't have any composite inputs. So my options were to mod my old composite systems to support HDMI (which was going to be cost prohibitive), find a USB device that accepted composite video (which is becoming difficult as composite video devices aren't really being made much any more), or find a converter.
I opted for the last option, but when I started looking, there seem to be two kinds of converters: those that cost around $20, and those that cost around $400. There's very little in between. The low end ones tend to have a lot of reviews, and about half of them say that the product is great, while about 20% of them say that the product is garbage, does a bad job, and failed in some way a few days/weeks/months after purchase. So, trying to decide which low-end converter to throw my money away on was a tall order. Even though I'm pretty sure that they're all made by the same OEM, and are all identical except for the brand name stamped on it.
While I was mulling over my options I went to my local Walmart for an unrelated reason and decided to check out their A/V section. I figured that given the target demographic for Walmart, they'd cater to the kind of people who held on to technology far longer than is normal, because buying a new TV is expensive, and this old VCR still kind of works if I flip it upside down. I wasn't actually expecting to find much, but they did have exactly the item I was looking for: a composite to HDMI converter made by some company I had never heard of: Blackweb.
They specifically mentioned 'gaming system' on the box, so that's probably a good sign! Several of the boxes were opened and looked to have been returned, that's less of a good sign. The cost was slightly higher than the cheapest ones I found searching around online (about $35). I opened one of the unsealed units and saw that it was pretty barebones: composite in and micro USB power in on one side and HDMI and 1/8'' audio out on the other side.
Seemed straightforward enough that I took a gamble on it.
Setup was exactly as I expected. I plugged my NES into one side and the HDMI output to the other side and routed that through the Live Gamer Portable 2. The resolution was locked at 720p with no way to change it that I could see (although the listing on Walmart's website shows a few more bells and whistles than the one I got. Maybe there's a model refresh somewhere?). Output was... not great.
It worked, and latency was almost good enough to play it while watching the encoded output (by the way, the clacking you hear every once in a while is me pressing buttons on my NES Advantage. I hid the video coming from the webcam but forgot to mute the audio). I used a splitter to send the signal to my TV and the converter separately so I could watch the television instead of the recording window. There were artifacts everywhere though. These didn't show up on the television picture, just on the video coming through the converter. I even tried a different set of A/V cables, but that didn't make much difference.
It was cheapish, though, and I didn't have to order it online and wait a couple of days to have it delivered. So I guess it would work in a pinch, especially if I have to have something right now (i.e. a streaming emergency, but those don't happen too often), but I don't think I'll be using it much. Unless I can't find anything better.