What is a video capture card?

You might have heard of HDMI Video capture cards, but what is it? As the name implies, a capture card “Captures” a video signal and can be used to be stored or streamed. This can be useful if you want to capture a video game console. Video capture is the process of converting an analog video signal such as that produced by a video camera, DVD player, or television tuner—to digital video and sending it to local storage or to external circuitry. The resulting digital data are referred to as a digital video stream, or more often, simply video. You might not be able to capture DVD players or other movie playback systems, since movies are copyrighted. Capture cards are used for recording and streaming on-screen content – most commonly by video game streamers. Nowadays, some game consoles, such as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, have built-in streaming capability. So, do you need a capture card to stream? The short answer to that question is NO! But I need it to live stream my camcorder, so yeah I am an exception. Due to limitations in computer power and data-speed, current generation consoles aren’t able to render and encode video in real-time at a high-quality. That’s where game capture cards come in. So yes, capture cards are useful, anyway, bye.