AverTV HD DVR spec?

[gshock]

Hi. I was hoping someone that owns the AverMedia capture card ( hdmi, component/analogue break out ) could clue me in on some of the specs I haven't found elsewhere yet.

1. Can the AverTV/AverMedia HD DVR capture card capture uncompressed video frames?

2. What is the maximum bitrate for video recording? Is it imposed by software or by the chip/hardware itself?

3. Can the HDMI record audio? ( I've read some owners state they couldn't capture audio over HDMI. I'm aware there might be limitations on which formats of audio the card can record/mux overall but I just want to know if audio only captures over the L/R analogue or if it can capture/record HDMI audio at all. )

4. If I want better audio couldn't I just use a usb attachment for toslink/optical-in, feed the video cables to the Aver card, the opt-out into the audio-card/usb-device, capture them both and re-mux them afterwards?

( Or have the capturing program do the rest as far as encoding/muxing, even better if possible. )

O/T does the Hauppauge Colossus handle uncompressed streams? ( ie. not 20mbps encoded H.264 ) IOW. Can you use software encoding if you don't want it to be done by hardware?

[Brad]

1. Yes, but you would need RAID0 (or a large SSD that you don't mind killing with writes) to capture uncompressed successfully. Lossless makes a lot more sense to use and works well with one fast HDD. The only capture format is YCbCr 4:2:2 - all other input signals like RGB are internally converted.

2. The bitrate of uncompressed is always a function of the resolution, bit-depth, FPS, etc. For the lossy formats, the included software has limits on the maximum you can select. For MPEG-2 the software lets you select up to 40Mbps and for AVC up to 15Mbps. You can still use third-party DirectShow software and whatever codecs you have installed though.

3. Uncompressed stereo audio works fine over HDMI for me BUT you may run into issues if your source doesn't use 48kHz.

4. What USB device will allow you to capture SCMS-flagged optical? If you do find one, you will still have to sync every capture manually, and you're limited to the lossy formats that can be transferred by SPDIF.

O/T: No.

[gshock]

Thanks for that information.

@4. M-Audio Transit