Hi! I'm pretty sure you can capture video FROM a camcorder onto a laptop if your camcorder has analog inputs and your laptop has analog outputs, but how 'bout the other way around? In other words, can you capture your web-browsing activity from the laptop TO the camcorder? If it's possible, what kind of quality could one expect? Many, many thanks!!!
In your statement you confused input and output. ;-) Your camcorder does not need input capability in orde to get the material from camcorder to PC. For the other way around, yes your camcorder of course needs to have analog input capability. And if it has: just connect your video output from your PC to the input of your camcorder and press record. The quality will not be bad at all.
Oops, my mistake. I DID mix up the input/output terminology in the first sentence. Thanks for your reply. I do want to buy a camcorder with analog inputs, but they're increasingly harder to find, except for the Canon HV20. Several camcorders have what they call DV input, but I'm not sure that would work for my purpose, since I have analog outputs coming out of the laptop. Thanks again!
My Sony DCR-HC96 has a port for connecting from a VCR. It's an S-video type jack, but does take the video and audio from the VCR. It can record to a miniDV tape or act as a digital pass through to the computer.
I am not sure if there is software that you can run on the background that outputs the screen directly to the Firewire port so that you can record it using the DV-in of your camcorder. Another option is to record your screen to a file first (with a program like Camtasia or so) and then output that file to your camcorder over Firewire (e.g. with WinDV or any other program). If you are looking for a camcorder wsith analog in, check the reviews on www.camcorderinfo.com. They list the specs of almost every camcorder around which tell you if they also have analog-in.
I've tried Camtasia and often when videos are playing on the Internet, the screen goes black, even though I disable video acceleration like they suggest. Camcorderinfo dot com has a lot of good info, but most of the camcorders that have the features I want are no longer in production and are hard to find anywhere. The Sony HC 96 would be a possible choice if their accessories weren't so expensive.
Maybe storing the video locally first and then play it will help when recording with Camtasia. There are still quite a few not-to-old models around that have analog-in. A fast way to fidnd some model": use the search module of camcorderinfo http://camcorderinfo.resultspage.com/display.php?p=D&ts=v3 For some reason it comes up with the same list whatever you enter, but at least it displays a column that tells you if a model has analog-in.
