Hi-res uncompressed capturing?

[GUTB]

What's the best card for this job? No hardware compression of any kind, just straight frame dumps to the HDD.

[Arepiv]

In principle a TV card should be enough provided it supports capturing at full resolution which is far for being clear for me.

Manufactures of TV cards specify max capture 320x240 @ 30f/s max where the chipset they are using is supposed to go up to 758x576 and 30f/s. Very strange ! I have not seen yet a TV card specified for 758x576 capture at 30 f/s, but it seems some people are using them for high resolution video capture. And my old ATI AIWPro will not capture AVI with more than 480 verical resolution.

The alternative to TV cards is then the complete graphic card with video in (ATI, Matrox, Asus, etc.).

Arepiv

[vitualis]

Most TV capture cards are based around the Brooktree chipset. Depending on the capture driver your card came with, you can definitely capture at full resolution (i.e., 704x480/576).

You'd have to have a pretty fast and pretty large HDD to you want to capture RAW for any period of time.

However, if you are willing to use HuffyUV or PicVideo MJPEG at 20 as an AVI capture codec, they give essentially lossless compression.

I can almost, but not sustainably capture at full resolution in PAL with my Brooktree based TV capture card with PicVideo MJPEG. The CPU maxes out and I drop frames on my PIII 500MHz. People have definitely mentioned that they been able to caputre full frame resolution with minimal framedrop on systems only marginally higher than mine.

However, most TV capture cards don't have a very good A/D converter so I doubt that you could classify them as "best". A capture card that can capture using hardware MJPEG would also be a good choice. Not only would this relieve your CPU of doing the task, but at a suitably low compression, MJPEG is "essentially" lossless. You can get excellent quality video captures on a DC10+.

Regards.