Great information esp with regards to capture of video, this is exactly what I have been trying to accomplish for some time and this really helps. My purpose of capturing is archive recorded content off my DVR which up to the December of 2013 was allowed until my cable provider enforced the copy once flag on premium content recordings (HBO, Starz and such channels). Up to that point I could use my "popular" branded DVR to transfer content from the box to my PC for later use.
One thing however with the tradition procedure described the aspect of sound quality and capture hasn't been really mentioned too much. I'm using the Black Magic Intensity Pro option which I'm pleased with, however my HDMI source includes Dolby digital and with for example h.264 encoding has the option to encode more than two channel stereo.
What are the options to do such? The Black Magic setup I have appears to limit the sound decoding to 2 channel PCM stereo. Being a total newbie in this area, do I need something else to accomplish such? Up to now the Dolby decoding was very limited until the last couple of years due to HDCP restrictions and the overhead of CPU processing and as a result Asus created created a multimedia device for home media centers. While the below mentioned device respects HDMP, the stripper function side steps that road block.
As I understand the problem with HD digital audio is the decoding and re-encoding on the fly which one piece of new hardware I'm considering is the Asus Xonar HDAV1.3 card which while I don't believe it will function as a video capture device, I'm hpe that it will do the Dolby digital decoding so that I can use it was the audio capture device with the BM Intensity capturing the video source. The asus card has both HDMI input and output with the intended function is to preform the Dolby digital decoding for your home media server.
Any thoughts? I'm active in several other AV forums and the subject of HDMI capturing is taboo so it's difficult to discuss such a subject so any input would be appreciated. THANKS!
The end result is that I wish to capture HD quality video and preserve the HDMI source audio which contains the Dolby digital 8 channel sound tracks.