Question / Help What is the best game capture device?

6ix

New Member
Quality, performance, features, stability, easy of use... which one is most recommended?

My guess Live Gamer HD?

What is everyones thoughts on the LGP?

This would be for single PC streaming.
 

dodgepong

Administrator
Community Helper
Nothing. In almost all cases, you don't need a capture device to stream from a single PC. Streaming with a capture card is arguably slower than using Window Capture with Aero enabled or Game capture.

Only get a capture card if you are doing dual-PC streaming or streaming games with hackshields that prevent hooking, or games that use DirectX 8 and older and cannot be run in a Window.
 

6ix

New Member
What about RECentral that comes with Avermedia cards? They seem to have a nearly no hit on performance. Granted the application is basically featureless. Just raw recording/streaming. No live overlays or scenes. Less encoding = more performance.

Ever think OBS will ever have a setting similar to how they do it? That is for people with capture cards.
 

dodgepong

Administrator
Community Helper
I have a Live Gamer HD but never use RECentral. I'm not sure what encoder they use, or what kinds of quality settings they use, so it's hard to say what exactly they do and how much performance impact is really has.

In the future, OBS will probably support more video types and encoder types besides x264 and QuickSync (though h264 video is what you pretty much have to use if you are streaming) so I'm not sure how it will go. But for the time being, if you're capturing a game on the same computer you are recording/streaming with, then a capture card will not help your performance.
 

6ix

New Member
Recentral does all the processing onboard and then sends that stream to Twitch.

OBS like Xsplit re-compresses the feed before sending it out to Twitch, regardless if an image overlay is used or not. If an overlay is used, I'm pretty sure that OSB and Xsplit recompile twice. Once when the feed is feed in and then again after the overlay has been injected.

In Arma 3 I get 10-15FPS with OBS.
In Arma 3 I get 45FPS with Recentral.

I would like to use a central application for streaming. For console ports and games with low system requirements I'd like to use OBS so that I can take advantage of the different scenes. For more demanding games like Arma 3 I'd still like to use OBS even if it didn't have the ability to render additional scenes. I'd still like it to be-able to pass through the video without modifying it.
 

dodgepong

Administrator
Community Helper
6ix said:
Recentral does all the processing onboard and then sends that stream to Twitch.
It's possible that only RECentral is able to do that. OBS and Xsplit can't do that because it has to use the DirectShow filter, and you definitely can't both capture and encode using the hardware encoder whe using the DirectShow filter.

6ix said:
OBS like Xsplit re-compresses the feed before sending it out to Twitch, regardless if an image overlay is used or not. If an overlay is used, I'm pretty sure that OSB and Xsplit recompile twice. Once when the feed is feed in and then again after the overlay has been injected.
No, they don't. The image from the capture card is only ever compressed once, and that's done by the x264 encoder just before it is sent to the RTMP server. Before that, the image is grabbed from the DirectShow filter and it looks the same in RECentral as it does in the Xsplit/OBS preview. If anything, it would be the AVerMedia software that would alter the image.

6ix said:
In Arma 3 I get 10-15FPS with OBS.
In Arma 3 I get 45FPS with Recentral.
Okay. OBS and Xsplit are doing a lot of extra things, more than RECentral is doing. If you want to add anything else special to the scene, you have to pay the price. You might have something messed up in your configuration or capture setup that might be making it run even slower. Or it could be, like I mentioned, that only RECentral is able to capture and encode with the (crappy) hardware encoder.

6ix said:
I would like to use a central application for streaming. For console ports and games with low system requirements I'd like to use OBS so that I can take advantage of the different scenes. For more demanding games like Arma 3 I'd still like to use OBS even if it didn't have the ability to render additional scenes. I'd still like it to be-able to pass through the video without modifying it.
If you're just recording locally, you can set OBS to record at high settings so the video doesn't really get compressed. Like I said, it does not compress twice.
 
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