4 ms·

Are the gamer HDMI capture devices expensive because they have a low latency? (Besides the verticality of the market.)

gm-conspiracy 10y ago
I believe they are also doing the encoding into a compressed format. The method in the link gives you the raw HDMI stream, which you can containerize to play in VLC and the like, but you wind up with some pretty large files. You could potentially be capturing a raw 4 to 18 Gbps stream.
- dfox 10y ago
  The method in the link involves capturing whatever the HDMI extenders use as their compression format, which usually is MJPEG or some (I-frame only) variant of H.264. [Edit: Added MJPEG, as this seems to be case for the device in the article]
warmwaffles 10y ago
Any capture devices you know that are decent? I've been toying with getting one to do demos.
- georgemcbay 10y ago
  I use the AVerMedia Game Capture HD 2 to capture HDMI from Xbox One and PS4 and I've been very happy with it. Unlike a lot of such devices this one is stand-alone, I don't plug it into a PC, I just use it as an HDMI pass-through, plug a USB3 external hard-drive into it (it also has a bay for internal 2.5 SATA HDD, but I use an external drive so I can just pull that out of the capture device, plug it into a computer to get the captured mp4 files over quickly and easily for editing). The stand-aloneness of this device is pretty great because it means you don't need to muck around with drivers on your other computers, though YMMV depending upon specific usage, a lot of people like to do live streams directly to places like twitch and this device isn't really well suited for that sort of thing. Also, this device (AFAIK) doesn't do HDCP pass through. Game systems generally don't enable HDCP during gaming (but do during, say, blu-ray playback). So that certainly makes it less flexible than solutions which will allow HDCP capture.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  I have an Hauppauge HD PVR2 "Gaming Edition", which now costs about $135 and I can recommend. The only downside is there's a long "boot time" after you first tell it to record video (don't expect to just hit a hotkey and capture video 2 seconds later; give it more like 10-15.) For what I'm using it for, latency doesn't matter much. I'd estimate it has about 1.5-2 seconds of latency, but I've never actually measured it.

I believe they are also doing the encoding into a compressed format. The method in the link gives you the raw HDMI stream, which you can containerize to play in VLC and the like, but you wind up with some pretty large files. You could potentially be capturing a raw 4 to 18 Gbps stream.

dfox 10y ago
The method in the link involves capturing whatever the HDMI extenders use as their compression format, which usually is MJPEG or some (I-frame only) variant of H.264. [Edit: Added MJPEG, as this seems to be case for the device in the article]

warmwaffles 10y ago

Any capture devices you know that are decent? I've been toying with getting one to do demos.

georgemcbay 10y ago
I use the AVerMedia Game Capture HD 2 to capture HDMI from Xbox One and PS4 and I've been very happy with it. Unlike a lot of such devices this one is stand-alone, I don't plug it into a PC, I just use it as an HDMI pass-through, plug a USB3 external hard-drive into it (it also has a bay for internal 2.5 SATA HDD, but I use an external drive so I can just pull that out of the capture device, plug it into a computer to get the captured mp4 files over quickly and easily for editing). The stand-aloneness of this device is pretty great because it means you don't need to muck around with drivers on your other computers, though YMMV depending upon specific usage, a lot of people like to do live streams directly to places like twitch and this device isn't really well suited for that sort of thing. Also, this device (AFAIK) doesn't do HDCP pass through. Game systems generally don't enable HDCP during gaming (but do during, say, blu-ray playback). So that certainly makes it less flexible than solutions which will allow HDCP capture.
blakeyrat 10y ago
I have an Hauppauge HD PVR2 "Gaming Edition", which now costs about $135 and I can recommend. The only downside is there's a long "boot time" after you first tell it to record video (don't expect to just hit a hotkey and capture video 2 seconds later; give it more like 10-15.) For what I'm using it for, latency doesn't matter much. I'd estimate it has about 1.5-2 seconds of latency, but I've never actually measured it.