Cheapo HDMI capture cards: Any hidden gems?

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kitty666cats
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Cheapo HDMI capture cards: Any hidden gems?

Post by kitty666cats »

I’m sure many of you remember seeing this and 1,000 other clickbait-ey videos popping up roughly a year ago:

https://youtu.be/daS5RHVAl2U

It definitely piqued my interest at the time, but didn’t look a ton further into it.

Fast forward to present, there’s like 800,000 of these things all over Amazon etc etc… have any of you tried out a particular one that ended up being surprisingly nice? I’m sitting here in 2022 with a USB3HDCAP I’ve barely ever used & all sorts of gear allowing for un-scaled (or upscaled; either-or!) old game consoles via RGBS over the DVI-I input, and could easily pop it all on eBay for nearly $200… alluring when you hear that there’s perfectly capable $20 capture cards. But there is *so* much to sift through and I don’t know if there’s any that people have found to be substantially superior to all others.

Anyone here with input, experience or knowledge?
AaronSR
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Re: Cheapo HDMI capture cards: Any hidden gems?

Post by AaronSR »

I was also curious and somewhat recently there was a newer "cheap capture card" released that can do YUY2 1080p60, I also have the USB3HDCAP and honestly, side by side they look exactly the same. The only downsides are there's no scaling (they are mainly camlink clones meant to just simply "pass through" the video), so 1080p in, 1080p out. Also there's no driver settings such as color range, audio volume etc. but you can simply do all that through OBS. Also they have HDMI passthrough (up to 4K) to a TV/monitor which also doesn't have HDCP, so you can hook up a PS3 directly to it.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001414377381.html

(its the grey one that says YUY2, the other ones are only MJPEG which obviously compresses the hell out of the video).
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kitty666cats
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Re: Cheapo HDMI capture cards: Any hidden gems?

Post by kitty666cats »

Nice! Very informative answer - will definitely take one into consideration… I’ve also been wondering for quite a while about some of the slightly older Datapath PCI-E cards (stuff prior to the Vision E1 / E1S or whatever RetroRGB has extensively documented). A lot of those can be found for pretty decent prices, too.

When you use your USB3HDCAP, do you usually just send 15kHz sources straight into it without any OSSC et al beforehand? That *is* pretty much the main reason to own one, but I forget if there’s any particular downside or upside to feeding it 240p sources (I suppose oddball resolutions/res switching on some consoles like PS1/Saturn is an annoyance, actually)
AaronSR
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Re: Cheapo HDMI capture cards: Any hidden gems?

Post by AaronSR »

No I really only use the HDMI input because yeah as you pointed out, the "No Signal" dropouts when hooked up directly are annoying and a lot of stuff I stream is PS1 with res switching. Oh also this cheapo card has an optical audio port but its an output, I had hoped to use that with the PS2 but I guess I'll have to get a scaler that has that instead (Morph or OSSC Pro).
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Rulumi
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Re: Cheapo HDMI capture cards: Any hidden gems?

Post by Rulumi »

Most are USB 2.0 and use MJPEG, so avoid that ones if you can.
If you can find ones that can do YUY2 or better in high resolutions, like that one was linked seems to be, it may be worth to give it a try.
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