Comment by jasongill
5 days ago
20 years ago (well, 25) it was actually more common than it is now - many computers in the late 90's to early 2000's came with video capture cards built in. The Sony VIAO for example, or some "multimedia" machines. The Hauppage WinTV cards and similar knockoffs were popular as well. I remember working on the Linux kernel modules/drivers for these types of cards (I want to say that the project was called "Video4Linux" or similar).
Being able to "watch TV" on your computer used to be a somewhat popular request from well-to-do consumers, and as DVD's came out, people started wanting to digitize their VHS tapes, and video capture cards (the same concept as what the article is doing) allowed that.
Most of them only supported the yellow RCA video in, not VGA or DVI. Just the VGA/DVI to RCA adapter costed some amounts too(not $49).
I think it was really right before COVID that HDMI capture devices finally dipped below $200. Then that Macro Silicon chip at $9 appeared out of the blue and solved PC video input problem. 20 years ago it indeed had been prohibitively expensive to capture desktop video outputs.
The challenge was high bandwidth nature of raw display outputs. Just 1024x768 @ 60Hz is over 1Gbps without overheads. A capture device for that is not something that can be "just" made.
I had one! Watching TV on my desktop was great in the pre-streaming era.