If you can watch it, you can copy it!
It's a fairly simple process, but does require some investment in kit. Happily Amazon has nearly everything.you'll need!
- So what kit do you need?
- a Set Top Box, Streaming Stick, DVD Player, or whatever! What's important is that your source device has connects to an HDMI input.
- A cheap HDMI splitter, why "cheap" later...
- A good quality encoder box.
- Loads of fast storage!
- and a good, fast, low latency internet connection (so you can receive your target stream with no hassle.
As you may be aware HDMI connections deliver uncompressed video and/or audio data to your screen/speakers. RGB, or other methods such as analog, s-video, and so on.
But the HDMI quality improvement comes at a price!
Part of the specification of HDMI includes High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), desgined to prevent theft of copyrighted material. However, the plans of mortals rarely come to uncompromised fruition...
If you plug your HDMI device into a cheap HDMI splitter, the HDCP is generally ignored (because it's cheaper for the manufacturer to build devices which ignore it). So what you do is:
- plug your HDMI source device into the HDMI splitter, and one output of the splitter into your capture device, and the other into a TV (otherwise cueing and controling the source become tricky, unless you have an exceptional memory).
- Cue the souce material up.
- Capture it. Generally speaking yoi'll want same fast, large storage, one or more of these would do. You don't need to go as faras getting 3 of them and RAID 1.
- Edit to taste (Vegas Pro isn't a bad editor).
- Write the edited material to the storage medium of choice (DVD, streaming media file, whatever),
- That's it!
- That was easy, eh?
There's a wide range of HDMI capture equipment on the market. Personally, I favour the Blackmagic design H.264 Pro Recorder, which gives an excellent result and offers the possibility of timecode injection via an HDMI to SDI converter!
and this HDMI splitter
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