[any ANONYMOUS forum user]

My friends and I having a bit of a dilemma here. We want to record direct game footage of Halo3, but we don't have many ideas to make it cost effective. I was hoping if anyone with experience could share their ideas with me.

Being that we'd be capturing game footage from a cabinet, we're dealing with a DVI output. The ultimate goal would be to get the footage on to my laptop so I can encode the videos with live commentary as well. Using a DVI to VGA converter and plugging that into a VGA capture device seems to be the best option, but those apparently cost $350 or more. Is there a better way?

My laptop does have an HDMI port, but to my limited understanding it's only output and not bi-directional (unless there's some trick to this).

Any and all help, input, and advice is much appreciated. Thanks!