Video In

I'm looking at getting the Sager NP8255 as my first gaming PC, but that's besides the point. I want, at some point, to build my own gaming desktop. All computers have video out, but they never have video in. Has anyone accomplished this? I know Xbox has it's own separate drivers, hardware components, OS, etc, but the Xbox 1 supports video in. I know it must be possible somehow, but I'm not sure how.
Think of all the possibilities of Video In:

• 
  T.V. No more spending tons of money on an HD t.v., after all, you already spent a lot of money on your 3840×2400 display. I know you could just unhook and rehook the cables from your monitor to your cable box, but his end up getting annoying. Instead, you're able to plug your cable box directly into your computer and just switch between television and gaming.

• You could plug in other game consuls into your computer.

• I'm sure there are other reasons, but I can't think of any.

• Recording directly into the computer from a hi-res camera.

Anyway, has anyone done this or know how?

 

My M18x has a video in built in already.

 

Yeah, m17 and m18 lines are the only two I know of. Maybe Clevo or ASUS. Not too many offer HDMI-in. Reason for that is the conglomerate of Cable providers, movie studios, etc. don't want a computer to have an HDMI-in port for the hacking community to tap into and be able to bypass the HDCP protocols. Then they can record all the Blu-Rays and HD Programming they want and put it online for free. And once it hits the torrents, there's no stopping it. So they have a legitimate concern to coerce computer manufacturers not to develop HDMI-in ports into their systems.

 

Except there are adapters that you can plug in that offers video in, so pirates can do it anyhow. I wouldn't recommend it for gaming, but for video copy, no problem.

 

If you're not planning on recording stuff, video in isn't useful, it introduces input lag (so gaming isn't going to be great) and you also need to have your desktop running to use it.

A better solution imo is to get a monitor that has hdmi input, if it doesn't have enough, you can simply buy a hdmi switch and connect as many devices as you want to your monitor.

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How do y'all think the Xbox 1 does it?

 

Does what?

 

The Xbox 1 takes video in. The E3 demonstration showed nearly instantaneous transition from gaming to watching t.v. Al of this is through the Xbox 1 itself.

 

That's nothing special, you can get hdmi in adapters for desktops, and if you're using the hdmi in for tv, you don't get input lag.

Using a console on the hdmi in would result in small but noticeable differences in times between when you press a button and see a corresponding action on screen.

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Side note: When you said Xbox 1, I assumed the first Xbox instead of the Xbox One for some reason.

Anyways the Xbox One HDMI in and HDMI out (only HDMI out, no component, composite or w/e), so my guess is that it's just passing the signal from the input to the output and that's it. There is no switching the signal from HDMI to another format.

To get the signal from a HDMI in to a laptop display, you'd have to convert the signal from HDMI to LVDS, it's not just a simple pass through.

 

I thought that was a possibility, but I didn't know for sure. I still think there's some software stuff going on in there. It's the only way you can switch between playing a game and watching t.v.

Do you think you'll still notice lag if you plug a 360 into the One?

 

If there is any software to switch and it's not a straight pass through, there will be some input lag.

I'm not sure how bad the input lag would be nowadays with faster equipment, but I remember using tv tuner card on desktop to play consoles about five years ago and you would normally get about a second of lag.

I used to have this usb tuner card that was optimized for playing console and the input lag was much less; maybe 100-200 ms, which for most games was noticeable, but not much of a problem.

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O rly? I am only aware of the Hauppauge full size PCIe card for desktops that has an HDMI-in. Other than that, Hauppauge has a video capturer that connects via USB, but it take component video, not HDMI.

 

You can find a large number of workstation cards that support hdmi in, a quick Google search brings up black magic design which had a PCIe card with dual inputs, as well as a usb 3 and thunderbolt variant.

AVerMedia has a consumer oriented PCIe card on newegg for $89.99.

I used to see advertisements for workstation cards in my IT magazines for hdmi input cards, if you want I can probably compile a list of hdmi input cards when I get some time.

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It was more a comment of surprise. Do the workstation cards support HDCP or are they more for unprotected media transfer during the editing process?

 

As far as I know the main advantage to workstation cards is that they are supported in a lot of video editing programs whereas consumer cards may have no or limited support.

Regarding HDCP as far as I can tell it is not supported in the workstation cards (presumably because they assume you would be working with the source directly and wouldn't need to encrypt at that point).

Apparently there are some cards from China that work with HDCP as well as some workarounds for non supported hdmi input cards.

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Ehh. I guessed as much, being workstation cards and all. It's not like I'm interested in being a warez pirate. But there are certain specials on cable channels which are old and unpopular, but that I would like to record in case they aren't run again. I just don't want to have to pay the King's ransom Cox Communications demands for their DVR service.

But so far, the Hauppauge PVR has worked well for me.