Question / Help Hauppauge HD PVR

[Shaymoe2]

Hi, I bought this capture card about 3 years ago now (rough guess) and I used it for my Console, which worked fine. But I wanted to see if it worked for PC games such as League of Legends. I'm having trouble with it, I don't know what set up i need or if i'm doing anything wrong. When I Add Source (Video Capture Device) on OBS, my HD PVR comes up as option, when I click Ok its just a black screen. I'm confused. Can anyone help me out. Thanks!

 

[Cjn826]

it gives me a red screen when i do the same thing (HD PVR 2 GE plus). and now im getting lag and frame drops from streaming now for no reason in monitor capture

 

[Sapiens]

There is no benefit to using an HD PVR with a single PC setup, and it isn't supported as a video capture device in OBS anyway. Stick to window/game capture for your PC games.

 

[Shaymoe2]

There is no benefit to using an HD PVR with a single PC setup, and it isn't supported as a video capture device in OBS anyway. Stick to window/game capture for your PC games.

Can you please explain why it isn't a benefit, I'm just curious.

 

[Sapiens]

Because you gain nothing from using the HD PVR to capture the content when only a single PC is involved? Other than an increased delay from video processing, and being forced to use window capture on a separate program to get the video into OBS. There is no performance gain. There is no reason to use this type of setup.

 

[Shaymoe2]

Because you gain nothing from using the HD PVR to capture the content when only a single PC is involved? Other than an increased delay from video processing, and being forced to use window capture on a separate program to get the video into OBS. There is no performance gain. There is no reason to use this type of setup.

Doesn't the capture card reduce CPU usage by encoding the video instead of your computer encoding it? I assumed thats how it worked.

 

[Sapiens]

Some encoding happens during video processing on the capture hardware itself, since a USB2 device like the HD PVR can't fit all of the uncompressed video data over that type of connection. OBS would still encode it with x264 prior to sending it out, so you would see no performance benefit there.

Even if you used a capture card that supported hardware encoding like the Live Gamer HD, and even if OBS supported that card's hardware encoder, and even if you could both capture with the card and use its hardware encoder at the same time (you can't without using AVerMedia's own software), it would still be pretty inferior to x264 - somewhere between the ultrafast and superfast presets. Capture cards are great for getting console footage, and great when you're using a 2PC setup where a second PC is encoding all of the video from the first PC. They are generally a waste of money for single PC streaming unless you have some very specific capturing needs.