Actually I think this is less of a consipracy than you think. The bitrate on composite or DVI inputs for HDTV is REALLY high, I think about 20mbs and it is all uncompressed. Storing the data uncompressed is not really workable because it would fill even a huge harddrive in a few hours. Compressing in real time that much data on the fly exceeds the abilities of typical processors. Since HDTV is actually sent as a compressed stream any capture solution is designed to capture the stream and write it to disk before it gets uncompressed for display.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I think this is less of a consipracy than you think. The bitrate on composite or DVI inputs for HDTV is REALLY high, I think about 20mbs and it is all uncompressed. Storing the data uncompressed is not really workable because it would fill even a huge harddrive in a few hours. Compressing in real time that much data on the fly exceeds the abilities of typical processors. Since HDTV is actually sent as a compressed stream any capture solution is designed to capture the stream and write it to disk before it gets uncompressed for display.