Comment by numpad0

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.