USB - Blackmagic Design Video Recorder

According to the specs it only captures SD. I think the Happauge 1212 is still the leader in this category:

http://www.buy.com/prod/hauppauge-12...ml?dcaid=15890

I'm interested in this solution too. From what I've read it can be done, but it's a bit complicated and hardware intensive.

I'm just wondering if any progress has been made since early 2008. If real time encoding could be added to the mix, this should work well. I just don't know how to do that Here is a discussion on the Sage group about BMI

Once upon a time I wrote a how-to guide for using the BMI as a tuner in SageTV, which includes how to capture and do real-time encoding. The reason no progress has been made since then is because the Hauppauge HD-PVR has since been released and is a much better solution. The only reason I'd suggest the BMI over the Hauppage HD-PVR is for video editing (which is what the card was designed for in the first place). In that case you'd want to capture the raw (or lightly compressed) video rather than the h.264 compressed video. The HD-PVR encodes all video to h.264.

...ah, that was an excellent writeup. I used it to get my Intensity recording for over a year with SageTV. But I finally broke down and got a couple HD-PVRs. The mpeg based Intensity recordings were eating up too much disk space. I did attempt to get it to do some real-time, single pass h.264 but it was just too cpu intensive.

How about with todays CPUs. Is it still to CPU intensive?

Mike

I'm the kind of guy who can't stand saying whether or not something is possible without ever trying it myself (that was half my motivation for writing that how-to in the first place, so many people saying you couldn't encode HD MPEG-2 in real-time who had never even tried when in fact I knew it could be done), but my guess would be yes, encoding HD h.264 via software real-time is still too CPU intensive. I was using a Q6600 for my testing and I don't think an i7 provides the additional horsepower you'd need. However, one huge differentiator would be if significant progress were made on a GPU-accelerated h.264 encoder, which I haven't looked at in a while.

I'm curious to understand why you'd still be interested in using the BMI? If your goal is real-time h.264 encoding, why not just go with the HD-PVR?

I couldn't do it with a Q6700. But it seems that it's "just" possible with a fast i7 system using x264, per a discussion over on Doom9. I sold my Intensity about two months before I picked up an i7 system so I was never able to test it. The Hauppauge device is just so much easier to use for my purposes.