multi-input HDMI capture hardware suggestions

[gjerdav]

I've been using OBS with four of those little no-name HDMI to USB converters for awhile, and while they mostly work I'd like to find a better hardware option.

Can anyone suggest a reliable PCI-E card with multiple HDMI inputs (four would be ideal) that works well with OBS on the Linux platform? At the moment I have my eye on an Acasis 4-input card. I'd love to hear if anyone has experience with it. I don't need 4K support - 1080p60 or even 1080p30 is fine.

Currently I'm running OBS on a 4th-gen i7 system with 32GB RAM, a GTX1650 for hardware H.264 encoding, and an SSD for recording. My Linux flavor of choice is Ubuntu Studio.

Typical challenges I've had with the USB capture devices include intermittent framerate drops, occasional loss of signal due to flaky USB connections, and random re-ordering of souces upon reboot (the devices look identical to the system and the USB enumerator isn't consistent in the order it initializes devices on each boot cycle).

Thanks!

 

[AaronD]

Can anyone suggest a reliable PCI-E card with multiple HDMI inputs (four would be ideal) that works well with OBS on the Linux platform? At the moment I have my eye on an Acasis 4-input card. I'd love to hear if anyone has experience with it. I don't need 4K support - 1080p60 or even 1080p30 is fine.

I have an Acasis 4-input SDI card on Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS. Works great!

The driver comes as source code that has to be built on the target machine, but that's fine. I also have to rebuild and reinstall it every time I get a kernel update, so I just put that in my script that handles all of that anyway, and it's fine too. It does require the script to work in two parts though:

1. At the end of the process and ready to shut down, see if we got a kernel update. If so, create a temporary "flag file" on the hard drive, and reboot instead.
2. On startup, if the "flag file" exists, delete it, rebuild and reinstall the driver, and shut down.

As you might guess, I run the first part of that script myself instead of directly shutting down, if I'm done for a while. (I have a desktop file for that, in ~/.local/share/applications/ so it appears in the system menu, and then I added it to Favorites.) The second part runs on every startup, and does nothing if that file is not there. Both parts run as root. Anything to do with automatic updates are turned completely off.

With all of that said, however, it seems that after I got mine and installed it, they changed a fundamental part of the driver and broke it. Looking through the code, it seems that they changed partners or something like that, and had to remove the old base and stuff another one in, and the swap wasn't done very well. Maybe they've fixed that by now, but I haven't checked.

...no-name HDMI to USB converters...
...
Typical challenges I've had with the USB capture devices include intermittent framerate drops, occasional loss of signal due to flaky USB connections, and random re-ordering of souces upon reboot (the devices look identical to the system and the USB enumerator isn't consistent in the order it initializes devices on each boot cycle).

Yes, yes, yes, and so on. Those things are not actually USB 3 as advertised, but a cheap USB 2 chip behind a genuine USB 3 connector. The additional pins for USB 3 are present, but not hooked up.

So you were probably actually trying to cram HD video through USB 2, with compression required in the card itself to make it even remotely close to working, and all the other problems that that causes...