1080p Component Capture Card

[phenixdragon]

Does anyone know if anyone makes a card that does this?

[paulbeers]

Do a search, this has been discussed many times. Yes there are cards, but they are professional level and waaayyy too expensive for the average joe. Also capturing raw component would take an ungodly amount of storage space per hour. I am not sure who originally posted this, I am just passing on what I have read. I take no credit in finding the information.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Also capturing raw component would take an ungodly amount of storage space per hour.

I think I read somewhere in the range of 40gig a minute

[paulbeers]

Yeah, that is kind of what I remember too, however, I wasn't sure on that so I just left it at "ungodly"....If you ask me 40GB/Hr is ungodly!!

[stanger89]

More like 5-10GB/minute. Somewhere between 300-600GB/hr.

[lobosrul]

I just bought a device that does component to DV thru 1394(firewire), however its not hi-def. The reason I bought it is my cable box will do an anamorphic (720x480) output on component, but not for s-video. Its an ADS A/V PYRO, I got it cheap on ebay.

DV compression is almost lossless and much less intensive than MPEG-2 compression, however its a much larger file size. Apparently 720p DV is about 6 MB/sec (50mb/sec). Or about 21 GB/hour. If you have a large HDD and only use it for the occasional recording, thats not unreasonably big.

If I can get this A/V PYRO device to work with Sage, then I bet it wouldnt be too difficult to run the Blackmagic Intensity HDMI device thru a DV Compresser filter in graphedit for use with SageTV (Sgraphrecorder).

Edit: I dont understand why no one makes a device like I just bought, only with support for 720p. I'd pay much more for it. And I would estimate 1080p DV is about.... 40GB an hour, just like evilpenguin stated.

[mikesm]

I think buying an R5000-HD is cheaper than trying to re-encode digital HD content along this line of thought... :-)

thanks
mike

[lobosrul]

I think buying an R5000-HD is cheaper than trying to re-encode digital HD content along this line of thought... :-)

IF (and thats a big if) your source does not use HDCP encrpytion, then no. It would only cost $240 plus shipping to do this method. If it does, you would need to convert from component to DVI, that would add on close to another $200. But thats still cheaper than the r5000.

However, if I wasnt stuck with cable I'd spend the extra $$ for an r5000. I just dont have the option. But even so, this isnt an immediate need or even want for me. Theres only 3 HD channels that Comcast currently has 5C'd here. And I can now watch them in 720x480 anamorphic which doesnt look half bad.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by lobosrul

I think buying an R5000-HD is cheaper than trying to re-encode digital HD content along this line of thought... :-)

IF (and thats a big if) your source does not use HDCP encrpytion, then no. It would only cost $240 plus shipping to do this method. If it does, you would need to convert from component to DVI, that would add on close to another $200. But thats still cheaper than the r5000.

Maybe, but consider what you need for raw capturing:

The card (anywhere from $250-$1000+)
Probably a couple TB of storage (want to record more than an hour right), say 4 750's (about $2k)
Good RAID card because single HDDs can't keep up with raw HD ($300-500)
PC with significant horsepower ($2k+)

That's about $3-4k in hardware, not including the PC, and not including the time it takes to re-encode (you're not going to be doing MPEG-2, H.264, or VC-1 HD encoding in realtime on anything available today).

$800 for a box that spits out MPEG-2 or H.264 bitstreams without generational losses and AC3 audio doesn't sound so bad then.

[otakucode]

Why wouldn't you be able to do realtime MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 capturing? Obviously you wouldn't be doing it with your machine taking the load, but dedicated chips that encode to MPEG-2 and such shouldn't be that expensive or need to be overly powerful. DCT on dedicated hardware isn't that tough... I would absolutely love a card that took component video and captured it in MPEG-4, and I don't think it would be all that expensive to produce. I've always thought the reason they didn't exist was because of industry pressures. As my entire setup is component based, it's a bit annoying for me that such a thing doesn't exist.

[lobosrul]

I think you hit the nail on the head otak.

Stanger your kind of over-estimating the amount of HDD space needed (if your working with DV and not uncompressed).

I already have DV recording working with Sage, but for some reason I cannot playback a live file D: Captures from HD channels (downgraded to 720x480) look better than most DVD's. I sure wish this stupid box would output anamorphic via s-video would save me a lot of trouble.

[roxy99]

lobosrul and otakucode are not talking about raw component 1080p video. Certainly that's the ideal consuler setup is to capture HD and downsize to 720x480 is still better than SD capure.

You may want to check out
http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/09/13...-card-for-249/

You can bet however, that studios will do everything in there power to make sure that digitally protected content cannot be copied. So your choices of HD recordings will be limited anyway.

1080p raw capture I think is clearly designed for professional film makers using digital technology instead of film technology. 40GB/min is not for the consumer - unless you happen to be into professional digital film editing.
(I saw an eposode of G4TechTV 'Call for Help' about it)

The enormous amount of data being streamed to the hardware card can be hardware compressed to mpeg format. However, the card would probably cost a lot. It doesn't exist because there would'nt be a market for it.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by otakucode

Why wouldn't you be able to do realtime MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 capturing?

No current processors have the horspower to do reatime HD MPEG-2 or H.264/VC-1 encoding in realtime. The later are on the order of 1/10 realtime I believe, maybe 1/5 at best.

Obviously you wouldn't be doing it with your machine taking the load, but dedicated chips that encode to MPEG-2 and such shouldn't be that expensive or need to be overly powerful.

The only hardware HD MPEG-2 encoder I'm aware of is the LSI Logic HDTVXpress, and last I heard, it was $20,000.

DCT on dedicated hardware isn't that tough... I would absolutely love a card that took component video and captured it in MPEG-4,

We all would.

and I don't think it would be all that expensive to produce.

HD compression is not cheap.

I've always thought the reason they didn't exist was because of industry pressures.

That probably has something to do with it as well, but that's not the only issue.

Originally Posted by lobosrul

Stanger your kind of over-estimating the amount of HDD space needed (if your working with DV and not uncompressed).

That's figuring uncompressed to maybe MJPEG. FWIW, IIRC D5 (what's used for HD Masters) is basically DV compression and is on the order of 250Mbps, that's a bit over 100GB/hr.

[Donny Bahama]

Originally Posted by phenixdragon

Does anyone know if anyone makes a card that does this?

Not one that's even remotely affordable to people like us. A couple of years ago, I had some discussion about this with Brick Eksten, President of Digital Rapids. I posted a thread on AVS asking for input, but the whole thing never went anywhere. There's some decent info in that thread about this sort of thing, if you're interested: http://archive.avsforum.com/avs-vb/s...hreadid=351900

[stanger89]

This is an interesting development on that front though:
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/02/fujitsu_hd_h264/

According to Chris Lanier in a post on AVS the chip is $100. Seems a major hurdle has been overcome on the path to an HD version of our much-loved PVR cards.

Perhaps it's time to start talking to the people at Pixel Magic Systems (makers of the venerable PDI Deluxe card) about an HD card with that chip.

[lobosrul]

Originally Posted by stanger89

This is an interesting development on that front though:
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/02/fujitsu_hd_h264/

According to Chris Lanier in a post on AVS the chip is $100. Seems a major hurdle has been overcome on the path to an HD version of our much-loved PVR cards.

Perhaps it's time to start talking to the people at Pixel Magic Systems (makers of the venerable PDI Deluxe card) about an HD card with that chip.

That sounds like what we've been waiting for! However it might be a long wait before we see a card available with this chipset.

[stanger89]

Yeah, sounds like at least 6 months before the chip will really be available.

[SHS]

sounds like at least 6 months before the chip will really be available

More like 9/12 months and most likely it never make it outside of Japan.

No current processors have the horspower to do reatime HD MPEG-2 or H.264/VC-1 encoding in realtime. The later are on the order of 1/10 realtime I believe, maybe 1/5 at best.

There min other but really cool one if have $9000 in your back pocket
Sorenson Media SqueezeHD XCEL
Key Hardware Features:
• Supports all MPEG-2 encoding options in Sorenson Squeeze:
• Main and High Profiles
• All Levels (SD and HD) up to 1920x1080
• Progressive and Interlaced
• 1-pass CBR, 1-pass VBR, 2-pass VBR
• Flexible, 100% software-programmable solution with no fixed-function hardware limitations
• Resolution-independent, precision-independent solution
• High quality encoding using advanced, hierarchical motion estimation for quasi-exhaustive search
• Supports large search ranges (± 128 pixel X & ± 96 pixel Y) and ± 1⁄2 pixel motion search resolution
• Future roadmap to H.264, VC1 and JPEG-2000 acceleration as well as other functions in the compression workflow
• Works alongside video capture cards from Bluefish444 and other vendors

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by SHS

More like 9/12 months and most likely it never make it outside of Japan.

Yeah, hard telling, but there are supposed to be "commercial samples" available in 3 months. Probably at at least 9-12 though until there would be any products using them.

There min other but really cool one if have $9000 in your back pocket
Sorenson Media SqueezeHD XCEL
Key Hardware Features:
• Supports all MPEG-2 encoding options in Sorenson Squeeze:
• Main and High Profiles
• All Levels (SD and HD) up to 1920x1080
• Progressive and Interlaced
• 1-pass CBR, 1-pass VBR, 2-pass VBR
• Flexible, 100% software-programmable solution with no fixed-function hardware limitations
• Resolution-independent, precision-independent solution
• High quality encoding using advanced, hierarchical motion estimation for quasi-exhaustive search
• Supports large search ranges (± 128 pixel X & ± 96 pixel Y) and ± 1⁄2 pixel motion search resolution
• Future roadmap to H.264, VC1 and JPEG-2000 acceleration as well as other functions in the compression workflow
• Works alongside video capture cards from Bluefish444 and other vendors

Sounds neat, but I was referring to PC processors (Intel/AMD). There have been realtime hardware HD encoders for a while, Sony has them for encoding HD on Blu-ray, TV stations use them to create the transport streams we recieve. But nothing even close to consumer level.

The Fujitsu chip is really the first "practical" hardware HD encoder.

[SHS]

Yup that ture nothing in consumer level and chip is only at $120 each in sample quantities maybe with Volume pricing it be around $100 each with 10,000 order so there for that card will most likey run around $300 per board by time add everything.