The unspoken part is that the images are from my modified Zoltrix Video capture card that I sell to folks. As I say in the lit. that I send out to people upon request.." usually I look at a item, figure out it's design flaws.. fix them, and use it for myself. I make one copy, and then move on.. In this case, I decided to make it available to others, for once."
The facts of the matter are that the stock Zoltrix card is not very good, at all. But, it has a decent layout, except for a few flaws in the design. I fix those, and improve the rest, in a significant fashion. The work is fairly extensive, and covers all bases. As for switching to a different card, it would probably not look any better than the Zoltrix does now (in it's modified form). So, why bother switching cards? The Zoltrix card has the advantage of having almost all the pins required for a digital feed mod already on the board design. This is the missing port on the board design, right between the remote control port connector,and the Conexant chip. you can see the traces run under the small chip on the board. That chip is the eeprom that holds the card identification data, which I had previously mis-labled as a outboard clock. The infection of the chroma input for the S-video was (and is) so severe, that I thought it HAD to be a clock. I was fooled by the fact that I was trying to track down the chip and came across a small 8-pin clock chip in the Digikey catalog, that has the same number descriptive. When I pulled the chip, and corrected the grounding around it, most of the vertical line noise went away. So, I assumed, and it was wrong. Slightly embarrassing, but such is life.
The digital video port on the card may need to have a few more lines put in, like a beginning/end, or send/end connection cable of some sort (two extra lines) as well as a clock signal for the external input, but I very much suspect that's about it. I don't think that ANY other video capture card is properly ported either. I just accidentally managed to be using a capture card that is nearly perfect for this application. Not quite, but close enough to be reasonably workable.
