If you wanted to launch a videogame site in the old days all you needed was high school grammar and a bunch of grainy, 300 x 200 screencaps of
Mario 64. Today's readers are a more fickle bunch, wanting monitor-busting screenshots and CPU-taxing HD videos of the latest
Xbox 360 and
PS3 titles. To cater to the sites who will cater to those gamers, Digital Foundry is launching the HDScope, a pixel-crunching, semi-portable PC designed explicitly for recording content in 480i, 576i, 480p, 720p, or 1080i via component or HDMI inputs. It sports a 7-inch touchscreen, meaning you can just plug this into the wall and start gathering footage from that exclusive (and oddly dusty) beta copy of
Duke Nukem: Forever you scored. No word on price or availability, but launch a site full of random videos captured on one of these and you'll surely be swimming in ad revenue -- and outrageous hosting fees.
[Thanks, Dirk]
posted Mar 24th 2009 9:32AM
Pretty Slick
Ah, yes this will definitely be used for capturing all those Blu Ray "Games" for everyone to share...
what was it for again?
Meh
I bet if you are posting videos online to your "gaming website" you probably already have a computer. Why not put a capture card in that and save quite a bit of coin. I'm sure there are USB, PCMCIA, or Card-Express versions if you want the portability.
They spend all this effort to create this ultra niche product, and it doesn't even output 1080p. Lame.
This article title coming to you from the Department of Redundancy Department
O.o
So... basically it's an expensive PC with a cheap HD capture card?
A card like this perhaps? http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/
By "cheap" I hope you mean "inexpensive" and not "low-quality".
The BlackMagic Intensity is a very high-quality product at a fantastic price point.
Do you know anybody that actually ordered and received one of these?
When I worked for IGN years ago, video capture was already extremely simple to do. I learned it in under an hour as an intern. I'm sure it is even easier today. I don't really see who the market for this thing is.
Years ago before they had HD and DRM'ed connections perhaps?
Um can we say, "High Def Camera's have Beaten you to the Punch". FAIL! I use a $100 1080i Jazz cam to get my videos and they come out pretty damn good. (YT: thatpspguy)
What format does the camera save as?
http://www.jazzcameras.com/ says mp4 avi
Screencap != camcap
Just like to point out that this is the Shuttle D10 (or D1000/14xx in the US). Same exact case - touch screen etc.
In Europe Shuttle offer this case barebones so you just add what you want inside. In the US I believe it is sold via Shuttles website pre-configured with a number of options.
Digital Foundry aren't offering anything great that you couldn't already do by building it yourself in Europe or just getting it as is in the US and just adding the extra part.
http://eu.shuttle.com/en/DesktopDefault.aspx/tabid-72/170_read-14870/
http://global.shuttle.com/product_detail.jsp?PI=1147
http://us.shuttle.com/event/computex/mediakit/Press%20Kit/Solutions_D10.htm
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856101075 for those curious. Thanks for the tip, by the way. I was looking at buying a Shuttle Micro-ATX machine, and this may be the one.
Forgive the n00b, but I thought DRM and other such magicks of the HDMI interface was supposed to make copying the outputs a difficult no no...
Yea, it's this exactly was hdmi is supposed to prevent?
Well it'll probably won't work while playing blu-ray and such and only for games and such I'm guessing.
I was looking up this stuff once. Apparently you need a minimum of 4GB ram to capture HD video and even then it isn't exactly real time (lag=bad for games). Plus it's not cheap.
you could use a hauppauge hd pvr for pass-through and capture the data on an eee pc probably. HD PVR does all the capturing and encoding to H.264 on the hardware so it doesn't need any cpu time which allows you to use older/slower machines without any problems. You don't need an extra screen because you are watching on a tv/monitor. You can get an hd pvr right now from dell for like $170 bucks.
Where do I get that case?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856101075
Shuttle D10 (see Shan's post above for more info)
Digital Foundry makes the *best* capture workstations for the games industry. Most other solutions aren't meant for capturing from consoles, and therefore aren't suited for it.
If you haven't used their products yet you wouldn't quite understand. I could see this box being EXTREMELY handy for games journalists. Going to a studio to get a preview or do a hands-on review? Bring along your portable HD capture studio that is very much plug and play and get some footage to go along with your story.
Yes, capturing video is "easy". Doing 720p or 1080p @ 60fps, flawlessly and with the image quality that matters - off of consoles? Much trickier.
Yo daw...nvm
This would make my job SO much easier.