Can you add Intensity Pro 4k support?

Herolordman

Herolordman

Member
There is currently no Mac solution for streaming a console with the new blackmagic intensity pro 4k card. This is a good opportunity to gain a lot of attraction. Apparently, the issue is that consoles such as ps4 and Xbox one output RGB HDMI while capture softwares typically only offer YUV input settings. You guys should be the first out the gate with BM IP4k support. BTW, this is a huge step as this would allow for 1080p 60/59.94 streaming, which the older Intensity Pro card did not support.
 
The card is recognized by OBS, and by black syphon, but there is no video as they are looking for a YUV HDMI source, and the ps4 outputs rgb HDMI.
 
I'll be making another attempt at this soon(ish), before 0.11.0 is released. I previously bought the device but it had some issues with my motherboard, so I wasn't able to test it.

That being said, I know what the fundamental problem with the device is, I just need to get it working in a machine that I can use directly before I can really do something about it.
 
Jim said:
I'll be making another attempt at this soon(ish), before 0.11.0 is released. I previously bought the device but it had some issues with my motherboard, so I wasn't able to test it.

That being said, I know what the fundamental problem with the device is, I just need to get it working in a machine that I can use directly before I can really do something about it.
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Hey, I see the new RGB/yuv settings in the update :) did you manage to get it working with the intensity 4k card? I haven't tried all the possible combinations and I don't know what settings I'm supposed to have it at.
 
I got the device working with my system, but I'm pretty sure the problems with the card are because of the card, not because of some incompatibility with obs unfortunately. All the problems that I had with the card were always reflected in blackmagic express, when the card had trouble displaying something it wouldn't even display it in their own program. The only way I managed to get my xbox 360 working with it in both blackmagic express and obs was setting my xbox to YUV mode; it's extremely unusual for a device to not properly support RGB output over HDMI. Honestly I can't help but to feel this device is just fundamentally flawed on many levels.

The card is one of the worst devices I've ever used in my life. The fan alone is the most loud fan I've ever encountered on any sort of device I've ever bought. I'm not sure how this card got approved for release by quality assurance. This thing is awful. Cheap in every sense of the word, sad to say. I couldn't wait to get that thing out of my computer just to get that ungodly loud fan to shut up.

So this isn't really about getting obs to support the device, it's about the device just being plain terrible. Really sad to see that they'd let this device out the door, because blackmagic devices usually tend to be pretty good. This has to be one of the worst devices they've ever released.
 
I emailed black magic to ask if this was indeed the product (meaning that it would never support the consoles.), or if they were going to make it work with consoles like the other intensity card works. They said that they have made it top priority to fix this in the next update.
 
Be aware that Blackmagic 4K inputs are terribly picky about the signals they will accept. We recently replaced a Blackmagic ATEM 2/ME video switcher with an ATEM 2/ME 4K switcher. None of the line inputs would accept 720p 60 video from Macs or PCs. Blackmagic advised us that changing the Blackmagic HDMI to SDI converters to their new 4K model was not likely to fix the problem. Changing to Decimator MD-HX cross converters fixed the problem. (And they are cheaper than the Blackmagic HDMI to SDI converters. The MD-HX has both SDI and HDMI on all inputs and outputs and can scale video as well as changing framerate. They are now a "must have" in our video troubleshooting toolkit. The apparent problem was that Blackmagic gear will not run at 60fps, but requires strictly 59.94fps.

I'm just guessing, but I suspect that Blackmagic uses the same chipsets everywhere in their 4K product line so capture cards and 4K Ultrastudios are likely to have the same problem.
 
FWIW - an easy way to encode 4K video will soon become important for live streaming of Virtual Reality content. The V360 camera from VSNmobil can provide resolutions up to 6480 by 1080. Finding a way to capture and stream video larger than 1920 x 320 has been a problem. (Yes it's going to require a screamingly fast processor and LOTS of bandwidth. ...but you just have to know that Gaming will lead the way to full immersion VR). Both Chrome and Firefox have teams working on bringing VR to the browser.
 
Just in case you're running at 59.94 for your device, make sure to set obs' framerate to 59.94 as well to prevent any random jittering in the framerate (compositing framerate overlap).

I'm not sure if there's a really feasible way to encode 4k resolutions at a high framerate that any sort of consumer-grade 4-core computer can handle currently, especially on single-pc setups. Even at least for the next 5-10 years worth of CPUs. Honestly, I suspect they'll most likely either scale down the image and/or cut the framerate for a very long time to make it feasible for average people to do something like that. Even for decoding as well. That being said, I still don't see x264 dying any time soon either in that regard either, in fact I think that with how optimized and fast it runs, it'll probably only make it more popular.
 
I agree, it's a lot of bits! There are some things like HEVC and DAALA coming down the pike, so things will get better. ...and it's probably GPU progress that will be more important than CPU as more processing gets moved to the video board/chipset. There's an update on the status of DAALA on Air Mozilla. Unlike HEVC, DAALA will be open and patent-free so when it matures I hope it makes it's way into OBS. Too early to mess with now though.
 
HEVC requires too much more CPU usage over regular AVC, and when combined with higher resolution and higher framerate video, it'll make it even less viable over regular AVC for any sort of live encoding.

The higher quality:compression ratio codecs always require higher CPU usage to encode.

I'm not sure if even hardware encoding will be enough to compensate to be honest, hardware encoding is more limited in terms of capability, if NVenc/quicksync/etc have been any indication.
 
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