I guess the thing that still confuses me is that most sources do not put out their full resolution via component connections (not for any technical reason, they just don't build them that way). So is the release of a component capture card sort of a non-event?
You become educated and do not purchase items whos outputs don't meet your desires. Inevitably you are screwed though... Do you have a QXGA display? I doubt it but eventually 1080p won't be so cool, all the devices nowdays may not have factored in every possible future resolution. HDMI is not likely an all purpose digital savior.Another thing I see often is the assumption that what you are getting has not been compressed (it has bigtime) or scaled or both. If you have a sat connection you are limited in bandwidth thats why they went / are going to MPEG4 formats. Maybe some should compare local ATSC against rebroadcast QAM and see if the cable provider is transcoding (they sometimes are). I can promise that none are doing this to benfit the customerThe fact is you get screwed but you won't know by how much unless you have a higher level of technology then the STB they give you to look into it. Same for HDMI in a PC based system you at least get some control over what it does.
As I described above, I would want a solution that gives me the same performance at the Extender location that I would have if the component was connected directly to the TV.
Technically not possible, however the difference will range from machine detected to absolutely horrid. In my rant about provider behavior I can make an example video that is 720p and looks like utter crap there is more at play then resolution and framerate alone. You can easily scale 480i up to 720p but that doesn't exactly make it 720p when done on the end. Can it improve the quality? Yup. But how do you know what your provider has or has not done?
(BTW you can use SageTV and scale anything up to whatever you want with all the glory of ffmpeg.)
If you mean 720p>720p and whatever it's max resolution**>same
You have control over the encoding process so you ultimately make the quality call, 1mbps crap, 5mbps ~okay~, 15mbps awesome!!! or 25mbps and you are wasting space.
**Quite possibly this is actually greater then 1080, this is a hardware encoder coming from a camcorder. There are quite a few megapixel and multi-megapixel camcorders out there. However this may not be true nobody knows until it's in hand however you should be limited by the encoding chip's capabilities.
Not interested in hacker solutions like the r5000HD because most source components have a feature life cycle of about 2 years or less and that thing is way too expensive for what it is.
I wouldn't consider the r5000hd a "hacker solution" I don't know what qualifies that but I assume it is volume alone. I know the cost of their materials is almost $400 so they aren't really gouging you either. The expertise to complete the modification and develop the software are not exactly in demand right now either. On the 2 year lifespan, although normally accurate with CE cable and sat STBs don't apply. To make the Vip211 obsolete from Dish would be quite an undertaking from them. In the same sence your cable box is probably more then 2 years old now, I know my dads is probably 12 (Motorola DCT2000) and the new ones aside from the HD unit were the same. These companies just don't change hardware like every other CE device seems to. On the flip side the PC parts loose value faster then gravity pulls, the component capture card will probably debut at $250 but quickly be down to $80.
I would like an infrastructure to distribute full HD via TCP/IP and be able to upgrade source components and TVs at will (so no custom stuff). It doesn't sound like this Component capture card gets me any closer to that.
So now where would you get "full hd"?
The answer is Blu-Ray and yes you can today. All Blu-Rays should have the same quality available on the disk.
The component capture is ultimately limited by your components output. If that is an r5000hd it is exactly what was broadcast, if it decoded by the sat box and sent out component then is reencoded it will be less. Same as all component outputs are and always will be encoding and decoding doesn't help the situation at all. You cannot have what you desire today, I am sure someday you will or some worthwhile compromise (Live TV systems). However the more you learn and the less confusion you have the better choice you can make be it SageTV, MCE, Tivo or do nothing at all for now.
