For EE Tards - How To Read Data From An LCD Controller?

Question

Is there a way to take an LCD Monitor and remove the actual LCD panel and put a device in place of it that will read the signals that the LCD controller is providing to the panel and reconstruct those frames back into a file of stills that can be imported into a computer?

I meant "tard" in the nicest possible way. Believe me, I know EE's are smarter than me. I tried to be an EE. But I couldn't do the mathematics. That's why I am a lowly .NET programmer now...

Chas EE, I don't understand your answer. First of all, I don't know of a monitor that has an output on it. Secondly, the serial port (even USB) is going to be way too slow for the sort of data acquisiton I am talking about. If you are acquiring even 1024x768, 24 bits per pixel, 30 fps, that works out to be 70,778,880 bytes per second. 2560x1600 = 368,640,000 bytes per second. This DTR is monsterous.

While the frame grabber answer is fine as such solutions exist if the data is going over VGA or NTSC over RCA, this is not always the case. We are going to be dealing with ecrypted digital data soon, (i.e. HDCP over DVI/HDMI) where the data will not be available until the very last phase of output, that is when the controller actually writes the LCD. I want to acquire data that that stage because that is the only stage available for certain applications (i.e. HDCP over DVI/HDMI).

Answer 1

If you have access to the RGB video signal or even the digital video stream, there are multi-chip "solutions" that read digital video or RGB and perform JPEG/MPEG compression on them. There are also commercial frame grabbers available that basically do the same thing I described above -- you just don't have to design it from scratch.

Google: video frame grabber
to see what's out there.

.