"Why shit?" I hear you ask. Shut up, idiot. Because I can't be arsed with looking into it properly and seeing how I should be doing it, alright? I've only just figured out why the video files were fucking massive and how to crush them.

Right, the only thing I had to buy fucking separately was the Dazzle DVD Recorder. It's shit. But it was fucking cheap.



Jumping right in then, here are some pictures showing how shit should be plugged in and stuff.



So long as you didn't buy your Xbox off the back of a truck in Spain it should have come with a component cable. I plug the relevant cables into the dazzle and the remaining ones into my TV. Your TV is probably a shit old one and wont have the green blue and red component sockets.



Since the sound cables are running through the dazzle and I'm too high class to play games with no sound, I use the optical port on the back of the plug...


(Ignore the sexy VGA cable, I'm stuck in SD when I record)

Through the decoder box...



Into my sweet-arse headphones that you probably won't have.



If you're too much of a dipshit to realise that the Dazzle needs to be connected to a PC here is an image showing you the complicated interconnection.



Now for the software.



-VirtualDub: I use this to convert, resize, and compress video files (free download)
-Instant DVD Recorder: This is shit but I have no other choice, I use it to capture the video (came with dazzle)
-Sony Vegas Pro: This is pretty sweet actually. I use it to edit video files (erm...)

It is at this point where shit get's all gay. You'd think it'd be simple. Plug it in and use a video capture program to save the video. NO LOL. Life isn't that fair. It's actually harder than Michael Jackson at a nursery.

Let's have a look at what Vegas has to say when I try to do things the simple way



Looks complicated doesn't it OH WAIT WHAT'S THIS!?



More fucking fail error messages here to piss on my cornflakes. Good thing I didn't pay-- nevermind.

Let's try Virtualdub. Open source for the win.



Hoorah, progress is being made, I see my dashboard. BUT OH NOT NOT AGAIN.



NO AUDIO FOR ME FUCKING FAIL KICK IN THE DICK.

I suppose I had better use the shit bundled software. At least that is able to capture sound. Since it's made to record direct to DVD it only saves in the most gay file types ever. I mean what the fuck is a .VOB? Fuck if I know.



So now we use something that VirtualDub does well. Conversion. I'll open the .VOB with VirtualDub and get going.



Woah, what the fuck kind of aspect ratio is this? I'm not living in the 1800s man. I use widescreen. I had better add a resize filter.



Okey dokey what now. Ah yes. I don't want a 20gig file for a 40 second piece of video. So I had better add some compression.



Now, because life is fucking annoying, saving to a .AVI doesnt work straight away. I think my shit laptop doesn't have the horsepower to handle the conversion while it has a preview window open. So I have to check the save for job control box to run it later.



Then run it via the job control.



Right, you see ALL OF THAT SHIT above? That massive torrent of oversized step-by-step illustrated guide of failure and farce? That's JUST got me a .AVI I can actually use for something. Now I can open Sony Vegas and edit it.



But that'll do for this fucking guide. You people can edit shit yourselves.

Oh, and don't use YouTube because it is shit. Idiot. Vimeo is clearly superior for both quality,embed properties, and the flash player. I say that even after having my account removed and with it having all of my videos deleted for that fucking Assassin's Creed Teaser rip. YouTube is for people who love page views with no real meaning, or for when some gormless site ONLY lets YouTube be embedded. Quality, not quantity.

Other shit I'm too fucking annoyed to mention:

-Xvid codec for compression. You wont have it by default.
-MPEG-4 audio layer. I don't even know what the fuck this is. But I had to download extra shit to get it working.
-If I wanted to record my own voice along with others during a game I'd need a separate audio recorder running. As the shitty Dazzle software doesn't facilitate this.