Hardware help

[ahackhack]

Hello there all.


I'm wanting to capture in high definition. I've come across a card named the VisionRGB pro that is the right price (as compared to the videopump HD which is over six grand), the problem is that I don't know if it is capable of capturing HD video. Stills, for sure, but I want it to capture directly from my sattelite dish, not stills.

Any insight would be wonderful.
You can see the specs given at:

http://www.ems-digitalmedia.com/html/visionrgbpro.html

[txpharoah]

1. I don't think that's a capture card. It looks to only grab stills from video source. Maybe I'm just reading it wrong. The information isn't very organized.

2. I've never heard of it. Then again, it's a UK product. I live in... well... you get 1 guess. And we don't mess with HD at work, though I'm aware of some products.

3. You always get what you pay for in the world of video. If it is thousands cheaper, or even hundreds cheaper, find out why. "Nothing" is not an answer. It never is.

[ahackhack]

Well, I bought one, so I'll soon find out That's $1700CND I'll never have back. Perhaps I should have spent the money for a videopump HD?

In an email they sent me the dude said:

" We have recently released new beta drivers with SDK for the VisionRGB Pro, this includes a Directshow filter to enable recording of video to 'AVI' files using Windows Media Encoder or DirectX SDK. The next release will include a full WDM capture driver, this is anticipated to be released in the next few weeks. The software will be made free of charge, updates via email. "

So it "should" do what I want.
But you're right, from the website it's confusing to me. It obviously was not designed as a video capture card, and I think that accounts for the price differential. I think it will suffice, but I've been wrong before.

"Max capture 1600x1200 @ 85Hz refresh rate in two frame times
or 1280 x 1024 @ 85Hz real time capture..." what the heck does that mean?




I have to disagree with your sig, although not entirely.. you don't always get what you pay for. Research pays off, and you can save some bucks even on the smallest of components (DVD media being a good example) with a little knowledge. But, as a general rule, it's a good one.
This is not to suggest that the $1.20 DVD-R is the same quality, as a $6 disk, because, depending on your burner/player you may end up with more coasters with the cheapos. Just that there is a wide range of prices/quality of disks available (just as with anything else) and depending upon your setup your results may be perfectly acceptable with the cheapos. Like many things in life, the unknowlegable/lazy guy gets it in the end if you catch my meaning.

But, what do I know, I'm just a newbie.

[SHS]

This not high definition capture in fact I think you miss read it I belive this not what you want.
This need 15pin Sub-D VGA input what it really saying is you need Multi PC or a Laptop to do this.
With know where in world you live at it kind to tell weather you can get high definition over sattelite
It USA your SOL
But in the UK there is a option there know as DVB products
http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/html/digitaltv_prod.htm

[ahackhack]

My HD satellite dish output is 15 pin RGB out, and I'm in Canada.

[SHS]

That cool but still not going record in ture high definition format.

[ahackhack]

I don't know exactly what you mean.

Will it capture in mpeg-2? Definitely not, but that's not what I want to do, my aim is to capture uncompressed data in 1080i (that's the highest DTV resolution at present coming down from the sky on ShoHD), and that, the hardware is more than capable of doing. Even as it ships, it can capture .bmp's in up to 1600x1200 resolution 85 times per second.

It ships with a directshow filter, and SDK, so it is possible to write a capture program to create AVI's directly (beyond me at the moment I'm afraid), or you can take a series of bitmaps and create an AVI as a seperate step...after all, that's all an AVI is, with a header.... the card can more than handle the required frame rate....in something as simple as a webcam program, or with the Gimp, or GIF Animator. Even I can do that.

Will it capture sound? No, but again, I don't need it to.. I will be capturing audio directly with SPDIF in through optical Dolby Digital.

Is it designed for this application? No.
Will it work for this application? I think so.



This is definitely a "plug and play and play and play some more" solution, and it's definitely not for everybody, but I think it's doable, and messing around with it is half the fun. Can you imagine being able to capture Hi-def for under 700 pounds! I'll be elated for weeks. Not so much for the money, but because it's a bit of a feat at present. I figure that I'll have a direct AVI capture program working by the time BluRay home recording is available at a reasonable price. (Yep, it'll take me a few years)


I don't know if it will all come together, I was just hoping somebody was into this sort of mucking about and could point out the flaws in my logic.

[SHS]

I hope you have ton diskspace and most likely need raid setup in order for it to wirte fast enough to keep up AVI dump if not fast enough it start dropping frames left and rigth.
How plan cap SPDIF or should ture Dolby Digital sigel being far I know of nonething I know of can even do this.

[ahackhack]

I do have about 400Gb of disk space... that should be sufficient for encoding what I want to do... of course I don't want to to store things in that format... I ain't Bill Gates after all


There are several ways to capture digital audio.
The latest motherboards probably include autosensing SPDIF in/out's as this was to be in the latest version of the AVANCE'97 stuff.

However, mine is older than that, so I had to buy something extra. For $89 USD I got the Edirol optical digital audio to USB interface--the cheapest, and simplest model the UA-1D. (Made by Roland if I recall correctly) Functions pm a 16 bit PC interface compatible with 32/44.1 & 48MHz. Higher end models have a wider range of allowable frequencies, but it's more than I need..

It just arrived today actually, and there are copy protection schemes afoot, so whether it will be a triumph or not is another thing. If it is not possible now, I'm quite confident it will be once spdif in becomes more common. I'll try it out tonight and let you know.

[ahackhack]

As an addendum to spdif:

Many sound cards support spdif in, and more and more motherboards do as well. You may not have the cabling for it... but the cables are available for like 4 or 5 bucks.

The Edirol unit is ONLY required if your mobo and/or soundcard do not support SPDIF in. So you don't necessarily need to run out and buy one.

Of course you will have to monkey around with Winblows settings as well in order to make this a reality... maybe XP will autosense this?
Not with my boards at any rate, so I don't really know for sure, and I'm not motivated to find out :P

L8R's

[SHS]

Yup 400GB will do.
Yes that ture many sound cards support spdif in but fine a software to capture raw Dolby Digital bitstream data is a diff story

[ahackhack]

Hmmm, good point there, and you're right, I can't think of a program that will accomplish that feat, but I don't really want or need to for my purposes. Even if I could, I can't think of how you could manipulate that data to any useful format for playback.

For now however, I am able to capture the optical digital audio output on my satellite IRD, and save that as a wav file with SoundForge 6.0. I can then use BeSweet to create and AC3 file which is (to my ears) free of noise---something that the lame RCA style jacks that are on my capture board (ADVC-1394) could not do. In addition, it is decoded in Dolby surround at least, and it sounds awesome! Pretty much all I had to do was install the device, and then select it as my preferred record device in the control panel/audio devices portion of Winblows, and it worked like a champ.

I'll have to play a bit to find the best means of encoding the wavs, but if I can find something that will encode in DD 5.1 The end result will be even better yet, but I am happy with the results of my first effort.

Well, not my first effort really, I tried to get WinProducer to manage it, but I couldn't get it to go.
SoundForge was the second program I tried and it worked like a champ. I'm pretty sure that there are a lot more options than that, but basically using this method results in a clean, noise free wav file.


Total time from out of the box to a useable audio capture.... about 20 minutes.(I only captured about 15 seconds as a test)

It's a good day.