Advice on using PCIe capture card instead of USB for recording educational videos. No gaming.

[raarts]

Hi,

I am setting up to record 1080p/30fps educational videos (think powerpoint, some animations maybe, parts live video).

I have a MacBook Pro with an external 1080p HDMI display (set to 1080p/60, can't even set it to 1080p/30).
Using a $20 Techole HDMI splitter, the external screen output is fed into a $15 HDMI->USB 2.0 capture card, connected to a Windows 10 PC I bought.
This PC does not have an NVIDIA card, since I'm not gaming, just using the on-board Intel graphics. (Intel® H410, motherboard is H410M S2H).

Quality isn't that good though, my guess due to the cheap capture card. Generally blurry, lines/fonts not sharp, especially when blowing up part of the screen.

I am now considering buying an Avermedia Live Gamer HD 2 (or 4K future proof) for my Windows PC. Now I'm left with the following questions:

- is the fact that my external Mac screen is set to 60fps slowing down OBS?
- will OBS CPU load on my windows PC go up? I've seen people recommending sending uncompressed video to OBS
- Do I really need to buy an NVIDIA card? The Avermedia card will supposedly send uncompressed video, and OBS should do the rest? (I use QuikSync on OBS)
- will all this actually boost quality?

Thanks for any recommendations.

Ron

 

[Tomasz Góral]

- Mac setting - does matter
- your grabber is important, low cost grabber grabbing frame as MJPG (one frame is JPG), more expensive send not compressed signal (like YUY2 or NV12)
- your setting in OBS is important (send log file from OBS)

From your description it appears that you are using 1080p resolution, but your system is set to a different resolution or it is possible that you have set the bitrate low (which determines the image quality after compression).