I've been studying different capture device and software driver kits on both Windows and OS X.
On Windows we have DirectShow or "DirectX" which determines how a Windows device driver is written for Windows and then Third Parties can write capture applications to use those device drivers to capture video.
On Windows the options are (Device sends video, and application does X to save as Y ):
1. Uncompressed, saves as, Uncompressed AVI
2. Uncompressed, software compresses, and saves as MPG
3. Compressed, hardware compresses, and saves as MPG
On Mac there are several device driver models, Quicktime is close to DirectX.. but weirdly a lot of hardware vendors avoided the "Apple way" of doing things.. and mostly invented their own and then plugged back into the Quicktime "format" by storing Quicktime "compatible" files.
So there are:
1. Apple Quicktime "Video Digitizer" capture devices (certified)
2. EchoFX "Glide" capture devices (not really certified, more like "works with" OS X)
3. Completely off the wall independent device driver stacks, like the non-Firewire camera, Firewire network capture devices like (Elgato eyeTV 200, 300, 400, 500) and AJA IO.
Someone was asking about the Plextor M402 capture devices recently and it reminded me "There was one other"
4. The eyeTV device driver platform.. which was very broad and covered a lot of devices that never had native Quicktime or EchoFX support.
VLC (part of the VideoLAN family of products) had a "plugin" for eyeTV, which used the eyeTV developer API to access the video stream (before) eyeTV compressed it down into the .eyetv compressed format.
I have never played with the VLC on Mac platform before.. but now I think I plan too..
In particular
VirtualDub can save video as Uncompressed AVI files, or "raw" full frame and full color resolution files.
EyeTV rarely made this available to an end user because of the strain it placed on end users machine and the large file sizes. But if the VLC eyetv plugin can intercept the full frame and full color stream and save it to a file.. it (should) work like
VirtualDub on the Mac OS X platform.
Its worth a try since eyeTV supports about a hundred different devices and subtypes the world over, far more than Quicktime ever did beyond the basic camera support. Where Apple very early dropped support for devices between minor patches and releases and rarely certified hardware not made by Apple.. Elgato/Geniatech regularly sought to expand the reach of their eyeTV software support from tuners to video capture devices and beyond.
If anyone has been down this road before.. I'd be very interested to hear their story.. and how it went.
