Jim Robbins

Does anyone know of any hardware that can take component in and render either DV or mpeg? It seems possible to convert the 3 analog signals back to digital where then the WMV-HD encoder could render a HD disk on a standard DVD.
I hate that I can not record HD since many of the films/shows on D* are shown at bad air-times. I understand some future HD Tivo like devices may have some digital out for recording.

Scott L

No nothing yet. There is the PDI Deluxe and the Holo3D that has component inputs but they only accept 480i. Reason is either the current PCI bandwidth can't handle raw HD or for legal reasons no one has made such a card. If you run a search over at AVS there's a ton of info, most of it leading back to the same conclusion though, there's no consumer level card out yet and doesn't look like there'll be one anytime soon.

You can record OTA HD through an HD-tuner card, plus this is directly through grbbing the original bitstream.. no DACs involved. www.digitalconnection.com

Wayne Bundrick

Standard PCI can't handle it. You'd need 64-bit PCI. There are professional editing packages that use a 64-bit PCI card to capture HD-SDI, which is an uncompressed serial digital stream. And there are A/D boxes that convert HD analog component to HD-SDI. Put the two together and you can capture HD analog component. But it will cost you many kilodollars.

And I'm sure Jack Valenti would prefer that it stay out of reach of consumers.

Wayne Bundrick

\"It tastes like there\'s a party in my mouth and everybody\'s throwing up!\" -- Philip J. Fry

Wayne Bundrick

For example, the DeckLink HD from Blackmagic Design. It's a 133 MHz PCIX card and it captures HD-SDI. It still works with plain old 33 MHz PCI, but it can only do standard definition SDI at that rate. And the best feature is probably its price: $2000. That's unheard of in the realm of professioinal high definition gear. It's low enough that people can buy it and use it for SD work until they can afford to upgrade the rest of their equipment to HD.

One of these cards, plus a dual processor Mac G5 (or a dual-Xeon PC with a PCIX slot, as soon as they get the Windows Quicktime drivers finished), an A/D box, a good SCSI Ultra320 controller and an array of 15,000 RPM drives, and you're all set.

I think you can get all that for under $10,000. Not including software.

Wayne Bundrick

\"It tastes like there\'s a party in my mouth and everybody\'s throwing up!\" -- Philip J. Fry