Video capture

This article is about digital and analog video capture. For screen capture for computers, see Screencast.

Video capture is the process of converting an incoming digital or analog video signal (and accompanying audio)—such as that produced by a video camera, or other video source—for the purposes of using a computer, the cloud, content delivery network or AI servers to process, broadcast, provide image recognition or otherwise share the captured video.

The earliest 16-bit ISA capture cards emerged in the early 90s. These cards were supported by VIDCAP as part of the Video for Windows package. One early card was a sandwich of two cards as early processors needed more logic to even get up to 15 frames per second.

The move to early versions of PCI offered higher capture resolutions and up to 30 frames per second.

The latest generation of devices use standards like PCIe and USB to capture up to 4K video with 60 frames per second

This section is about electronic devices. For the music video by Weezer, see Video Capture Device (Weezer).

Special electronic circuitry is required to capture video from analog video sources. At the system level this function is typically performed by a dedicated video capture device, colloquially called a capture card.^[1] Such devices typically employ integrated circuit video decoders to convert incoming video signals to a standard digital video format, and additional circuitry to convey the resulting digital video to local storage or to circuitry outside the video capture device, or both. Depending on the device, the resulting video stream may be conveyed to external circuitry via a computer bus (e.g., PCI/104 or PCIe) or a communication interface such as USB, Ethernet or Wi-Fi, or stored in mass-storage memory in the device itself (e.g., digital video recorder).

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  A dual link 3 Gb/s SDI video capture card for PCIe (Blackmagic Design DeckLink HD Extreme 3D)
• 
  A PCIe 2-port HDMI video capture card (Datapath VisionRGB-E2s)
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  ISA analog video capture card
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  A Mini PCIe card that simultaneously captures 8 video and 8 audio signals (Sensoray 1012)
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  A low-cost, consumer-grade USB audio/video capture device (Reddo Videosieppari)

See also

• TV tuner cards, which employ video capture circuitry to capture broadcast television
• Frame grabber
• Uncompressed video
• Dazzle (video recorder)