My love-hate relationship with 240p

A few months ago YouTube updated their look, arguably for the worse. In addition to making the seek bar a mouseover that covers the bottom part of the video, they added an option for 240p - apparently for smartphones.

I didn't think much of it until I started noticing more and more how I just couldn't capture games on my Intensity Pro. I first noticed how the Intensity Pro wouldn't display PS1 GameShark or "It Might Be NES". Later on I noticed how I couldn't even play my SNES games through my Intensity Pro (these guys at AV Science Forum had the same problem). I started really scratching my head when I played Tekken 5's Arcade History; whether playing through my Gefen Home Theater Scaler and component cables in 720p or directly to the Intensity Pro through s-video in 480i, the Intensity Pro would just display a black screen whenever I played the first Tekken. Tekken 2 and Tekken 3 would display fine, however.

I looked into it and I noticed some games just ran at resolutions below even 480i. This includes some PS1 games and pretty much every system earlier.

These resolutions are 240p and 288p. These are low-res and people who play arcade games (myself included) love those scanlines. Unfortunately, my scaler doesn't support those resolutions and when the Intensity Pro says "NTSC", they really mean "480i". Worse, only the most expensive scalers support them.

A comment from Fudoh's site:

Eirik A.

January 30th, 2009 at 2:23 pm

Seems like finally the VP50Pro got the 240p and 288p formats. “Added support for 240p and 288p Formats”. New firmware available. Wonder why the VP50 didn’t get it though (got a VP50 and an EDGE myself).

So... either I buy a $2,500 scaler, or the more affordable but still expensive DVDO Edge at $500 (official site) just to record every game in 720p60 while using the Intensity Pro's built-in passthrough so I can play them lag-free on my Asus VH236H, or I just suck it up and record in 480i on the somewhat laggy display of my Leadtek WinFast which has no problems displaying anything.

...

Okay, so it looks like I'm getting a DVDO Edge anyway. I don't know the difference between that, the iScan, and the VP50 (UPDATE: here's a comparison chart), but it's cheaper, and anyway...

Fudoh on AVS reports that the Edge does do 240p correctly.

So there.