Quote:
Originally Posted by afalzone
Component is component. I would think that it would take the same bandwitch to capture a crappy picture as it would a high def one. |
Oh not nearly, component can cary a wide variety of resolutions, timing, qualities etc, from SD (480i) to HD 1080i/720p. SD (crappy) component is 480i or roughly 250Mbps, HD component on the other hand is much higher, 1080i and roughly 1.5Gbps, HD is 6x the data vs SD.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rgb
Never say never. |
I agree, it was said Cablecard on the PC would never happen either. However...
Quote:
I suspect that PCI, PCI Express, USB 2.0, and/or Firewire analog component capture devices will surface wihtin the next 3-5 years for well under $1000.
They will keep the PC bus bandwidth manageable by doing the A/D conversion and video compression (MPEG2/WMV9/MPEG4) in hardware chips on the capture card. That way, the MPEG2/4 stream can be piped over the USB/Firewire/PCI bus at realistic bit rates. |
I would be rather surprised if this happens, why? Because the resources to compress HD are MASSIVE, and consumers don't get HD in an uncompressed form, all HD available to consumers comes as a compressed digital datastream. As such, there is no "legitimate"* need for something to take uncompressed HD and realtime compress it. Conversely, with SD material, much of it is sent uncompressed to the consumer (SD cable, OTA NTSC, home movies, etc), as such there are completely legitmate uses and needs for such a device, and there seems to be no push to create a cheap, consumer hardware HD encoder.
*by legitimate I mean "no other way". It's like this, we're already allowed to record digital bitstreams via cable DVRs, satellite DVRs, ATSC/QAM capture cards. Basically the only reason for an "HD Component Capture Card" is to capture stuff the content owners don't want us to capture in a way they don't want it captured (unprotected). It sucks, I know, and I (personally) think recording the HD componente outputs is
completely legitimate, unfortunately, I'm not making the calls.
The future of digital/HD recording on the PC is going to be direct capture of the datastream (like we do with ATSC and clear QAM), but with DRM attached for the "protected stuff", ie encrypted digital cable/satellite.