A mass produced brand name box is unlikely, S-Video was for SD and a
product of its times. Component was early HD and replaced by HDMI.
Capturing the SD or HD signal was entwined with a desire for timer or
EPG driven schedulers, and multiple digitial Tuners or Cablecard slots..
dumbing that down to Component Input and timer or on-demand is one
strategy but the cost and rarity of those connectors is being driven out
by the HDMI single cable simplicity. Modern display devices more often
have HDMI connectors so that has become the standard.
Up to HD
2K game capture latency has driven the demand for HDMI splitters, which
sometimes didn't implement HDCP copy protection, so any HDMI card could
be used to capture HD if caught off a splitter, but it wasn't by design
and export controls actively work to find and drive those out of
business as quickly as possible. Since HD 4K its my understanding that
loop hole has been plugged.
Leaving Component input on legacy DVD
recorders and some PC capture cards. The quality of legacy DVD
recorders with Component input were poor and didn't really suit their
purpose, SD video capture. It was overkill bandwdith wise and the cables
costs more going from three cables for audio+composite to five cables
for audio+component. Only Laser disc could really use the bandwidth and
was a niche market.
And that comes to today and the home theatre
pc market, also vanishing.. but more from archival apathy.. and an over
abundance of trust in the cloud and belief that Copyright will be offset
by Lifetime viewer rights.. tho.. if content owners could selectively
erase human memories.. I think they would be overjoyed.
IMO..
magewell makes a very nice "tunerless" capture card that works with
windows, linux and mac in PCIe and USB form.. it has a well defined
built-in full frame TBC, DNR and Y/C comb filter with proc-amp.. full
retail is around 300 usd.. ebay sometimes 100 usd. The drivers adopt the
most popular api for each platform so it works with virtually any
software. But being "tunerless" its not exactly on the typical home
theater pc enthusiast radar.. its more "archivist" or content collector
targeted.
What made the DVD recorder especially useful in my
opinion was the remote, and simplicity of the task.. collect content,
permit limited editing and burn to disc. Compressing and moving all
those bits, even by ethernet was just too slow, and DVD-RAM never quite
supplanted the write-once and done DVD-R backup.
Finding that simplicity on a pc is very difficult, unless you walk a fine line and don't try to complicate things.
The
single simplest, familar interface on the pc for manipulating video
content is Windows Media Center, deprecated in 2010 its increasingly
hard to find.. so it is itself becoming "legacy". However, at least on
Windows 7, until 2020 it is still under support and somewhat
accessible.. Windows Media Center has a partner remote, and can record
"live content" from a tunerless input card if it detects an RC6 WME ir
blaster. these get cataloged into its library and can be added to a
playlist and burned to DVD and in theory Blu-ray.
That's the theory anyway.. and I'm pursuing it as quickly as I can to confirm.
I
really like DVD recorders.. some of the last ones are all linux based
and have a lot of upgrade potential.. upgrading to HDMI or component
input and blu-ray may be possible, someday, but their time post-burner
phase has not yet come. They are too valuable as they are for the moment
to the people spending a lot of money for them on the secondary market.
A
lot of the lessons learned about VCRs with DNR, line TBC vs frame TBC
and frame synchronizers, IRE, proc-amps and more are still applicable to
an expandable, modular, repairable - Component or HDMI recorder..
doesn't help with the EPG or Tuner problems.. but for the archivist
little is lost from a skills perspective.
ps. One thing to note about Component vs HDMI recording is that there is no known Copy Protection signal mitigation for false positives readily available. In the past Video Filters or something like a Grex could be used to silence the inaccurate signal degredation, whether on purpose or by accident or the result of noise.
" it is also beyond my knowledge to even know if the macrovision I, II signals that effect VBI effectively could be blocked because Components R,G,B is digitial and not analog.. however there are other levels of macrovision and CGMS flags as well now.. and Components digitizing chips recognize and honor these".
A popular method might be to use a Component to S-Video converter, that then runs through an S-Video Copy Protection mitigator, then back through an S-Video to Component converter.. but this reduces the value proposition of using Component by also causing picture quality degredation.
Also Component did not have a WSS or Wide Screen Signal "flag" procedural "standard" for advising the display device when a signal was being output in an anamorphic format (tall and skinny) that "should" be displayed on a widescreen display in an expanded pixel morphic aspect ratio. While one could be added "later" after capture, or with a specific "in-line" box for this purpose it was not "the norm" and complicated the use of Component out from sources or Set Top Boxes capable of outputing an anamorphic widescreen signal. In the beginning this wasn't much of an issue, but as DVD content became increasingly anamorphic and some cable channels would switch between 4:3 and 16:9 it has become an annoyance.
HDMI generally avoided most of the WSS problems by properly supporting it, and since the Copy Protection mitigation was a result of an oversight for lower resolution 2K signal splitter devices with low latency for game play and game recording.. temporarily at least.. HDMI has some advantages over Component recording.
