The Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive little computer-on-a-board with a low-power processor, an Ethernet port, and HDMI output. If you want a video input, y0u can buy an optional camera accessory… but if you want to go a bit further a team of developers is crowd-funding a project to create an HDMI input board that would let you capture video from a variety of sources.

The HDMI input boards will sell for $99 and up if the project meets its $15,000 Kickstarter funding goal.

Raspberry Pi HDMI board

By connecting to the Raspberry PI’s GPIO pins, digital audio connector, and CSI camera connector, the video capture model should let you record audio and video from a camcorder, desktop or notebook PC, game console, or DVD player. Basically anything that has HDMI output can be connected to the HDMI input module.

The team is working on three different versions of the board. The $129 Loop through model has all the features of the $99 basic model, plus HDMI video output and the $149 Deluxe model supports analog audio input, headphone audio output, an IR receiver and optional IR transmitter, among other things.

via MiniMachines

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15 replies on “$99 board adds HDMI input to Raspberry Pi (Kickstarter)”

  1. from where i would buy this board?
    Or any recommendation for buying Raspberry Pi with HDMI input port.

  3. very limited fonctionnalities… 720P60 for even the 150+ board.. that is more thatn final product like the avermedia Live gamer portable.

  4. I wish they would build stuff like this for the BBB rather than the RPi. The BBB has a more powerful CPU, better drivers, and a real Ethernet port.

    2. The BBB has a weak GPU while the Pi’s GPU is capable of HD video. They need to upgrade the BeagleBone’s video capabilities then it might seriously compete with the Pi.

      1. I did consider this when I wrote the comment above, and I would say that, depending on your intended use of HDMI-in, a faster CPU may be more useful (and remember also that BBB is ARMv7, rather than ARMv5).
        The blob driver in the RPi is generally fragile and feature limited, although the GPU is fast, but while that’s great for 3D, I’m not sure it’ll be too useful for OpenCV or similar.
        Also, if you want to push some of the captured HDMI out on the Ethernet you’ll want native Ethernet rather than the poxy USB Ethernet that the RPi has.

        PS The BBB does do 1080p output, although I doubt it does hardware 1080p decoding.

        1. Thanks for giving more clarity to this. I only understood it on a superficial level, as I’m a super noob programmer and don’t understand all the intricacies of the computer system yet. I should’ve added that it does depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. I was, however, stating that it’s probably why the RPi is more popular because the majority of users want HD Video.

          So if I used the BBB with software decoding, will it be smooth or will it struggle? I’m honestly asking here.

          Thanks

          1. My hunch is (and a page at cnx-software seems to suggest) that the BBB won’t manage 1080p decode in software, but may be able to do 720p.
            Even so, if you do want video decoding (480p,720p,1080p) I’d go for the RPi.
            3D graphics wise (OpenGL ES), the RPi would also win.
            If you want to do DSPing, matrix multiplications, and general compute intensive stuff then the BBB would perform better – it has vector processing support through NEON also. As a simple file or even www server the BBB will also outperfom the RPi.

            As to why the RPi is popular.. well, it came out first and has better availability than the BBB, as well as a bigger community, in part because of the education spin to it.

  5. And of course totally useless with input from most sources due to HDCP. You would be amazed at how many things switch the evil bit on for no good reason.

    1. HDCP was broken quite a while ago and you can quite easily buy products which remove it.

  6. Did someone say a relatively cheap HDMI recording device for streaming? Problem is they’re all fairly expensive, especially if you want 60Hz or high-res, but if it’s cheap enough the limitations are fine

    1. Check out Hackaday – there was an article about someone hacking a cheap HDMI to IP over Ethernet adaptor to record the stream on a PC. I think it would be cheaper than this set-up, and probably more performant.

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