Recording composite video to an audio file

Question

I'm trying to record raw composite video siganl to an audio file by connecting the yellow rca cable from a player to the mic input in my pc so I can then put the cable in my audio output and connect it with the video input in an old crt tv and play back the signal to the tv so that I can view the original video. But that didn't work and I can only see random white lines. Is that due to frequency limits in the audio format or in the onboard audio chip, or is analog-digital conversion and the other way when recording and playing back damaging the signal?

Answer 1

Video signals operate in ranges above 1 Mhz, where high-quality audio signals only max out at ~96Khz. Video signals would likely need to be be encoded in a format that an audio recorder could pick up, then decoded back into a video signal before a television could render it properly. This answer on the Sound Design exchange may be of interest to you.

Answer 2

A very high bitrate uncompressed audio file may be able to store a low-fidelity video signal, a black and white signal could be stored at sub-vhs quality, but could be at least a resolvable image, recording component video may be possible even though syncing the seperate tracks would be hard.

Answer 3

I tried it. Sampling rate is 192KHz. It can record up to 192/2=96KHz. I succeed to capture part of luminance signal. Color signal is in very high frequency. So we can't record color signal using soundcard. Video is very distorted. However we may can caputure more clearly using soundcard more highter sampling rate.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q_YraNAGhw&feature=youtu.be