Component capture devices...

[newmedia42]

I've been happily running the Sage for almost a year now, and am thinking towards the future of the system. I've played around with some of the HDTV turners like the Sasem, but to be honest I don't think it will ever be a realistic option for me, simply because even in the best case scenerio I'm going to want to record things like HBO-HD, etc that an HD tuner card isn't going to be able to get. Ideally what I would like is something that would take component out of a device (such as an HD cable box), and then do encoding on that, sort of like a Hauppauge PVR-USB2 that had component inputs as well. Right now the Sage controls my S-Video cable box into the PVR-USB2, why not the same with component inputs? Ignoring issues like data rate (maybe it's a PCI-X card instead of a USB device), is there anything like this out there or in the works? What (if any) are people doing with their current HD cable boxes?

[newmedia42]

I did find one, although it doesn't do hardware encoding... Pretty interesting though:

http://www.pluggedin.tv/sweetspot/

[briands]

I'm pretty sure that card is limited to interlaced SD resolutions on the componant inputs.

There are several hurdles (technological and legal) to overcome before we see any HD component input in computers.

[stanger89]

Unless you want to spend $5000 or so, there's no way to record uncompressed (component) HD. And even then there's no good way to integrate it with anything.

Your best option is the R5000 mod for your Sat box.

[newmedia42]

Briands, you're right, it only supports 480i and 576i - in a perfect world I'd love it to be able to support 720p (my native mode), or 1080i. Even as it stands though, it's NICE to be able to feed it component instead of SVideo - of course, it doesn't have audio inputs right now either, so that would be more of a gating factor for me with it...

Stanger, I actually don't want it to record uncompressed - I would like it compressed, I would just like the source to be at the best possible quality (the less steps in the conversion process, the better). Ultimately I'd love to have a box like the Plextor or something similar that could take component in, and output MPEG4 or whatever...

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by newmedia42

Stanger, I actually don't want it to record uncompressed - I would like it compressed, I would just like the source to be at the best possible quality (the less steps in the conversion process, the better). Ultimately I'd love to have a box like the Plextor or something similar that could take component in, and output MPEG4 or whatever...

Maybe I should rephrase that:

Unless you want to spend $5000 or so, there's no way to record FROM an uncompressed (component) HD source, like an STB.

I agree, it would be great if there were an HD equivalent of the PVR250, that accepted HD component inputs, and realtime encoded it to something reasonable, but there just isn't anything.