Is 480i the best an average Joe can hope for?

[gigantibyte]

Thanks to ajp_anton who pointed out the Leadtek WinFast PxDTV2300 H at the Doom9 forums.

http://www.leadtek.com/eng/tv_tuner/overview.asp?lineid=6&pronameid=399

"...supporting component video input up to 480p"
"Record digital TV to MPEG-2 and analog TV to MPEG-1/2/4"

The only thing I couldn't find in the specs was whether the MPEG encoding was hardware or software based. I also haven't found a place where you can actually buy this yet, but I read one blog where the list price was $250.

Hopefully someone will post a review soon!

[rcubed]

Pegasus Junk it after all it only captures in the same resolution that is being input so there for Up-conversion/Down-conversion is not supported and the card is AVI base on custom Canopus codec.

@gigantibyte

The Pegasus card is available currently from multiple on line vendors. I'm considering one to do HD captures.

Can't one capture at the higher resolution and then post process (transcode) to a lower resolution for example to burn to a standard dvd. Canopus includes their codec package (as they put it exposes them) so the files captured with the Pegasus can be inputted to the appropriate software i.e. Adobe Premiere? If the intent is to view them on the PC then the supplied codecs should allow the user to use Media Player for example to view them at the resolution captured. Unless some hardware or other encoding is supplied to a HD capture, the resultant files will be huge and probably require a multiple disk RAID configuration to keep up with the data stream to capture it in raw format. They would still have to be encoded before transfer to a playable media (ie DVD or BluRay).

If one had a BluRay burner and could afford the cost of the disks one could probably burn them as HD BluRay, although I'm not familiar with any authoring programs that are available to do BluRay. Academic in my case since my TV only has component inputs for HD and the powers to be have blocked putting out anything but 480 on the component output. Thank the RIAA, MPAA, and Sony for that. As has been pointed out in the thread the same people are itching to put a stop to the cable and satellite companies putting out HD on the component outputs of the set top boxes.

If component video is used as the input source some sort of in line device will be required to remove the copy protection when the CGMS is present (the local cable companies do this - copy never - on video on demand for example). These are available.

rcubed

[jagabo]

Add the Hauppauge HD PVR to the list. It can capture component video at 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i, and audio from stereo RCA or optical SPDIF (5.1 capable). It's an external USB 2.0 device. It ignores CGMS so you can record DVHS or PPV sources. Video is hardware encoded h.264, audio as AAC or AC3, in a TS or M2TS container.