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DVRs cannot record HDMI streams in hi-def due to HDCP protection.

HDCP's master key was discovered over a year ago. There's no technical (as opposed to legal) reason why an open-source DVR couldn't support HDCP input through a device like the Blackmagic Intensity. Software might be too slow to handle the decryption, but a FPGA development board would probably work.

the freelancers that are basing their video production business off of a dSLR video workflow

AKA: amateurs! If the budget wont stretch to an F3, RED or S16 it's not enough to hire a pro team.

It doesn't have the major high-end features like Color or Shake

Shake is dead isn't it? As for the rest...

• Editing
• Grading

.

There's nothing high-end about grading in 2011. Simply good colorists are as rare as good cinematographers or editors.

The key is "unencrypted". From http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/techspecs/ :

"For legal reasons HDMI input is unable to capture from copy protected HDMI sources."

BlackMagic Design makes PCI cards and USB boxes with unencrypted HDMI video capture.

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/

It also allows digital capture of content protected media possible with with low cost hardware. Maybe this will also slow the elimination of transport mediums (like analog) that don't allow DRM since it now could be sort of moot.

Also, for instance, if your cable company decides to lock down all it's analog outputs and drag it's feet on cablecards, you could still use your DVR of choice.

Get yourself a 1080/30p camcorder with HDMI out, and
an HDMI -> PCIe card
( MOTU, aka Mark Of The Unicorn
http://www.motu.com/video-products/hd-express-hdmi/ ,
and Black Magic Designs
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/ , and
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/techspecs/ ,
  ( only "shuttle" USB3 version can do 30p! ), both make one
http://www.provideocoalition.com/ for possibly others )

and you'll have ALL the data-storage-problems your heart could possibly desire!

C :

( PS: you may get better quality this-way than from recording in-camera:
some cameras send uncompressed, or unprocessed? video to the HDMI,
so you get better quality data )

Get yourself a 1080/30p camcorder with HDMI out, and
an HDMI -> PCIe card
( MOTU, aka Mark Of The Unicorn
http://www.motu.com/video-products/hd-express-hdmi/ ,
and Black Magic Designs
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/ , and
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/techspecs/ ,
  ( only "shuttle" USB3 version can do 30p! ), both make one
http://www.provideocoalition.com/ for possibly others )

and you'll have ALL the data-storage-problems your heart could possibly desire!

C :

( PS: you may get better quality this-way than from recording in-camera:
some cameras send uncompressed, or unprocessed? video to the HDMI,
so you get better quality data )

I remember the 6502...

Manufacturers can currently make cards that will work in modern Mac Pro computers. In fact, I seriously extended the life of my G4 Mac by installing a SATA card in it so that I could use (more modern and faster) SATA drives with the computer. I also upgraded the GPU. I will probably do something along those lines with my Cheese Grater and, maybe, it will be useful for about 10 years like my last computer.

The idea around the Apple // computer was that hardware hacks were a good way to extend it. And people sold breadboards that you could install and test on your Apple //. But you really needed to know what you were doing, else you could fry your motherboard and that would be really bad. So the Steve Wozniak part of the Apple Computer company did their best to publish warnings and specifications so that hardware hackers would make innovative stuff for the Apple //.

Today, hardware hackers are still out there. You can get the complete hardware information you need about a Mac Pro as a hardware developer, so that you can make a card to install in the computer to handle digital audio, VTR control, set up a hard disk array or anything else a Mac can do in the workplace. Were that not the case, there would be no Blackmagic Design, no AJA Video systems, no Digidesign, and no CI Design as just a few examples.

The spirit of the 1980s still lives on, mostly in the software communities that are writing free, open software. I don't see breadboards for sale these days for Apple computers -- but I don't see them for pee cees either. But that doesn't mean they are not being made. That means I'm not shopping for them.

I like where we have headed. It used to be that animation, destined for video (which is a much smaller screen than the cinema) took overnight to do just a few seconds, with a really expensive SGI workstation attached to a 1" C-format open reel VTR, recording one frame at a time (and you hoped there would be no h-phase errors, else you would have to start rendering all over). Today, we can play Doom real-time on our 24" monitors attached to our inexpensive personal computers with better than 30 frames per second render times for each whole frame in widescreen. The "computer" that landed the Lunar Excursion Module on the moon would probably be an inferior cousin to the processor you find in a hand calculator today. And those computers were really, really expensive. The Apple // did everything in "character mode," drawing things with very crude graphics developed out of an extended character set. Forget about shading, drop shadows and the like. So, looking at my Apple Studio Display, running in 32-bit color at 1920 x 1200 powered by my NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512 MB of video RAM, I'm seeing a nicer image than the Apple //, hooked up to a monitor or a TV using a box that the FCC said was illegal.

I'm still bummed that Pystar lost, even though they ought to have in every sense. Here were these scrappy guys out there trying to re-invent the Mac Clone. My first experience with Apple's System Software was with a Mac Clone. but I don't want to go "back to the future" and I don't hate Steve Jobs because of the result.

I've been using a blackmagic intensity pro for my own high definition video captures over hdmi/component
No linux support though, which is unfortunate
But it's very very very cheap (~$330 online for the pro, ~$235 for the hdmi-only version)
Didn't post in reply to your parent post as he was looking for something that was linux native, but, if you're working for an OEM, your company might be able to convince blackmagic to finally provide linux support.. They've been tethering on the edge for a while..

I have no doubt that you do. Here, I'll even link to such a device in that price range:
http://www.adstech.com/products/API-557-EFS/intro/ api557_intro.asp?pid=API-557-EFS

Will it capture HD over those component inputs, uh, no.

Want one that will? You'll need a bigger check book:
http://www.aja.com/html/products_Io_IoHD.html

Want a cheap solution? This is the closest you'll get right now. It is brand new, eats 400+GB/hour at 1080i, and its not supported in any PVR app:
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensit y/

Not trying to be an 'arse' here, but pony up some product specs and I'll suspend my disbelief.

You are right about HDCP being cracked:
A company called Spatz sold a box ("DVIMAGIC") that contained HDCP-decoder chips sourced on the grey market.
This box decrypted HDCP and had a clear HDMI output.
However they were forced by legal threat not to sell that product anymore...
I read that another company in Korea is still selling a similar box.

However you are not right about recording HDMI:
It is possible to record non-HDCP-protected HDMI signals with a box in the sub US$300 range:
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensit y/quality/

Combine those two boxes and off you go...

Of course the price point and availability does not make this interesting for the general public -
so the DRM serves its purpose in making it hard enough for the average Joe.

Actually, an HDMI input card is only $249.

See: http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensit y/

Here ya go:

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensit y/

  The Pro is what you need. Encodes on the fly too.

Would the DeckLink HD Extreme suit your needs? It's priced at $995 which is expensive, but still a lot better than $2000. They also have a HDMI capture card for $249.

Would the DeckLink HD Extreme suit your needs? It's priced at $995 which is expensive, but still a lot better than $2000. They also have a HDMI capture card for $249.

You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk.

Erm. Excuse me? There's even consumer-level hardware to do exactly that: Blackmagic Design's HDMI capture card - $249

Sure you can. And if you're going to say that you can't pipe HDMI into a computer, you'd be wrong there, too

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensit y/

Voila! One PCI-Express HDMI capture card. And no, it doesn't do HDCP (Yet), but considering how fast AACS has been bypassed, how long will it be before someone makes a Linux driver for this that decodes/bypasses the HDCP encryption?

Oh, and if you're worried about processing time, now you know what those AMD 4x4 boards (With dual quad processors when they come out, and stacks of RAM) are for. Capture to a high-speed RAID0 buffer (At a guess - SATA for 1080i, U320 SCSI for 720p, or fibre channel for 1080p), then have your 8 CPU cores using a multi-threaded codec to compress into MPEG/XviD/H.264/Your-choice-of-codec-here and store the completed file on a big RAID5 (750Gb drives, anyone?)

How long before MythTV has been upgraded for this kind of thing? It's exactly Myth's remit, after all.

This is an interesting device:
http://www.doremilabs.com/products/XDVI-20.htm
It converts a DVI signal into an SDI-HD signal.
Then with a card like this -- http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/hd/
and a disk array that could handle about 1.5 gbits/sec you could record the high-def signal in an accessible form.
With the drives we're in the $1500 range for all the gear, so it's not cheap, but it is 'prosumer' level.

Step 1: DVI (Analogue or Digital)->HD-SDI - XDVI-20s

http://www.doremilabs.com/products/XDVI-20.htm
http://www.onevideo.co.uk/xdvi20s-p-359.html
(In the UK £2,687.23 inc VAT)

Step 2: HD-SDI capture board - Blackmagic decklink HD pro 4:4:4

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/hd/
http://www.onevideo.co.uk/decklink-hd-pro-444-p-11 5.html
(In the UK £959.98 inc VAT)

There are many other alternatives to this. This is just one suggestion that I have tested to work.

For my capture PC:

Opteron 254 (2.8ghz)
Tyan Thunder K8WE
Adaptec PCI-X Ultra 320 SCSI Raid controller (39320 series)
4 x 300GB 10,000rpm Seagate SCSI disks running as raid0 (6-8 would be best)
New Nvidia graphics card
2GB ECC RAM

It's not only possible, it's easy, using off-the-shelf components.

First, convert the DVI signal to HD-SDI, which is the standard that all the professional HDTV editing gear uses.
Miranda DVI-Ramp

Next, capture the HD-SDI signal to your hard drive.
Blackmagic DeckLink HD

You will need a serious disk array to handle the bandwidth, but you will end up with a digital copy of the signal put out over DVI. That Miranda box does sub-sample the RGB (4:4:4) signal to YCbCr (4:2:2), but it is only a matter of time before someone makes a box that keeps it at 4:4:4.

You can currently do much of what you want with any input source, be it cable OTA or satellite. The problem is that it is very expensive.

What you need is something that combines the SDI video capture functionality of something like the http://www.blackmagic-design.com/site/decklinkhd.h tmBlackMagic DeckLink HD combined with a Component video to SDI converter.

To make this magical piece of hardware work, without needing massive amounts of RAID or a PCI express bus, you need a built in realtime Mpeg 4 compressor (so you could compress a 2 hour video down to about 4GB and still have about 3-4x the resolution of a DVD). I'm not sure how well the existing DeckLink RJPEG output works well enough to be useful.

And sell this all for around $500...

I searched the web and was able to find a company called Black Magic Design that sells video capture cards for both Mac and pc that allow real time keying of graphics. At $300 USD for an SDI board and software it's not that expensive.

From their website:
All SD DeckLink models now support internal keying allowing you to key graphics over live video in real time. This is perfect for adding logos and "bugs" to live video when doing dubs of your show reel; or adding copyright and not for broadcast notices to client dubs.

Key features are controlled by an application called Blackmagic LiveKey that enables keying. This is just like switching your video capture card into a keying card; DeckLink works very differently when keying is tuned on. Graphics with alpha channel displayed on the RGB video output will now be keyed live over any video that's connected to the DeckLink video input and then sent to the DeckLink video output.

You can choose "internal key" on all DeckLink models where keying is done inside the card and you don't need to use any external keyer equipment. You can also quick key a graphic in LiveKey as well as set key levels; and allow keys to animate on and off using independently set time values.

For external keying, DeckLink Pro features 2 independent SDI outputs and genlock allowing image and key video output from the separate SDI outputs. This lets you key in outboard equipment such as production switchers etc.

--Chris