How best to capture HD video as mpeg4?

July 17, 2010 9:28 AM

How best to capture HD video as mpeg4?

I want to be able to regularly capture video from an unencrypted HDMI source and have it eventually end up as either 1080p or 1080i mpeg4 video, with as little expense and labor as possible. I'm thinking of two possible setups:

• The BlackMagic Intensity capture device (probably the PCIe one), recording uncompressed to disk during the event, then doing the compression afterwards
• A combination of an HDMI-to-component converter (like this one) combined with a Hauppauge HD PVR for video capture

The former would be cheaper and probably give me better-quality video, but the latter does the mpeg4 compression in hardware, which would mean we wouldn't need to go through the extra step of compressing the video afterwards, and would probably let us get a crappier computer to do the capturing.

In my shoes, which would you go with? Or is there some other setup that would be better?

posted by andrewpendleton to Technology (2 answers total)

I would ask this over at doom9.org in the capture forum; there are a few members that do source->mezzanine->broadcast stuff at work and prosumer stuff at home and regularly discuss the pros and cons of various setups.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 9:34 AM on July 17, 2010

Why not transfer from HDMI to component and then get the Black Magic Video Recorder?

Records directly to h.264
posted by filmgeek at 7:45 PM on July 18, 2010