Okay; the full set up is that I have seventeen computers that I set up for a gaming convention. Sixteen old computers that run the various old games, and one more for dedicated servers and that will be doing the streaming.
I am setting up a number of them to duplicate their output to two monitors; one will go to the monitor that the player is using, and one more will go to my my streaming pipeline. Ultimately, that streaming pipeline will be displayed on a jumbotron in the convention hall (when they are not showing one of the other tournaments.) To get it to the jumbotron, I'm streaming to twitch via OBS, and they just put the twitch stream on their big screen.
Previously, I had just one computer with an HDMI output run through my capture device, and so that one computer could stream its output. But I want to have multiple computers that I can switch between.
My plan was to use an HDMI switch that supports five different inputs, and have five computers output duplicate signals (one to the monitor and one to the switch) and the switch feeds into my capture device, which connects to my main server, which streams the feed to twitch.
I was going to buy some devices to convert VGA to HDMI because most of my old computers don't have HDMI outputs.
Then I can switch on the fly between five different video feeds, so I don't have to worry about terminals that are vacant, newbs who suck and have boring streams, etc.
But there was one big problem with that. My capture device can't handle non HDTV resolutions. When I was testing out a machine at the last event, playing a game that was not playing at 1920x1080 killed my screen and I couldn't even see the passthrough on the device.
Most of my monitors aren't even able to support 1080p; to run the set up I first thought up, I would need to buy several brand-new 1080p screens (which is more money than I can put to this) plus those stations could never run a game that could not be set to run in 1080p.
But if I could buy a new capture device that could handle these older resolutions, that wouldn't be a problem. I could continue with the set up I envisioned.
I will take a look at that one you posted a link to; thank you. Maybe that will work out.
Or if I could buy several (cheap) devices that could convert the low-res signal to a 1080p signal, that would work too. I was looking around last night and I did find some devices that will convert and upscale a VGA signal, so that might work. But the ones I saw would stretch the image instead of pillboxing it. I guess I could set up OBS to change the aspect ratio, but that would be an extra step when I switch inputs that I would prefer to avoid.
I'm also thinking of adding an old KVM switch I have into the mix, so I could switch between four different VGA signals that get converted and then sent to HDMI switch, giving me eight different computers I could see in the stream.
Oh, and I don't think I could use OBS on the computers themselves; they are older and may not be able to handle using OBS while gaming. Besides, I want to have just one master controlling the final stream.
