HD Component/DVI Capture Card

[Mahoney]

Hi all,

There don't seem to be any Component, HDMI or DVI Capture Cards (at consumer prices!) for HDTV. Now I know that such a capture card would still need to compress the stream to MPEG-2 or MPEG-4, and obviously it won't be able to cope with HDCP content; but is there any technical reason why analogue Component or unencrypted DVI/HDMI shouldn't be captured? Is it simply that they haven't been made yet, or is there some active reason why they aren't being made? Is the processing necessary to cope with an uncompressed HD stream, whether digital or analogue, just beyond consumer cards?

If anyone knows of any such cards on the horizon, I'd be very interested. Sky (a satellite service who have a monopoly on most decent sport) are about to release an HD service in the UK, but you can bet your bottom dollar there will be no way to get at the raw MPEG transport stream. The initial boxes have to have analogue component out for backwards compatibility, so either that or a dongle to unencrypt HDCP looks like my only chance to continue to use SageTV and have HD sports content. The Sky boxes provide PVR, but as a media center they are crap compared to a full SageTV setup.