Question / Help What is the BEST (Quality) capture card on the market?

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DraB

New Member
I've been an AverMedia fan forever and have the Live Gamer HD at the moment. I want to upgrade to a 1080p @ 60 card. I want the best quality card available. I can admit that the best quality card back then even compared to the Live Gamer HD was the Black Magic Intensity Pro. Sadly i've read that the new one just has to much trouble. So i'm left with the Live Gamer HD 2, Extreme Cap U3, HD 60 Pro (I hate Elgato Products), and lastly the Black Magic Intensity Pro 4k that has a lot of trouble. From what I read both the Live Gamer HD 2 and Extreme Cap U3 have uncompressed video quality (This is why the original Black Magic Intensity Pro looked so good. I just want a card that is crisp and pops. My AverMedia right now is just dull and looks to boring. Adding color correction just looks unnatural so yeah that's out of the books too. Sorry for rambling but please let me know what you guys think!
 
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DeMoN

Member
Datapath VisionSC-DP2.
https://www.datapath.co.uk/video-capture-cards/visionsc-range/visionsc-dp2
It has custom FPS and Resolution up to 8k Capture.
4k60 possible. 2560x1440p @ 144hz possible - all @ RGB uncompressed.
The list goes on.
Very pricey but a hell of a card. I personally have it. I would recommend to capture with virtualdub though, because at least for me OBS is extremely stressful to the system at capturing directshow devices :x
Hell 20% GPU and 7% CPU just at idle which reduces in F1 2016 my FPS Rate from 80 to about 50 just by OBS running.
Virtualdub reduces the fps even with capture maybe 1 fps....
 
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DraB

New Member
DeMoN said:
Datapath VisionSC-DP2.
It has custom FPS and Resolution up to 8k Capture.
4k60 possible. 2560x1440p @ 144hz possible - all @ RGB uncompressed.
The list goes on.
Very pricey but a hell of a card. I personally have it. I would recommend to capture with virtualdub though, because at least for me OBS is extremely stressful to the system at capturing directshow devices :x
Hell 20% GPU and 7% CPU just at idle which reduces in F1 2016 my FPS Rate from 80 to about 50 just by OBS running.
Virtualdub reduces the fps even with capture maybe 1 fps....
Click to expand...
Keep in mind I will be streaming my PS4 / Xbox One 99% of the time. Ill look into this card and see. I really don't want to go over $200.
 
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DeMoN

Member
Please read.

Your packing box should contain the following items:

  • A VisionRGB-E1S video capture card
  • Installation CD-ROM
  • 1 x DVI/VGA, 1 x DVI/ components and 1 DVI/HDMI adapters
 
HotelCharliHill

HotelCharliHill

Member
I got it. It's great. 720p 60fps streaming to multiple platforms through restream and it looks nice, comparable to a lot of popular streamers out there. The recordings in mkv look great and once encoded to mp4 with handbrake, still look quite good on youtube. Again, probably as good as many popular streamers' VODs on youtube.
 
HotelCharliHill

HotelCharliHill

Member
DeMoN said:
For what the re-encode to mp4?
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Pardon? Are you asking WHY re-ecode to MP4? or what settings to do it at? I re-encode because youtube makes a dog's breakfast out of my mkv files.

Odd, I just rewatched my test video and it looked excellent... https://youtu.be/zDuvEWd66I4

One issue though is my record settings make videos that are generally 20 gigs. After handbrake they're about 3 and not terribly pixelated. So rather than waste time uploading a 20gig mkv (because looking at it again, it looks nice), I upload a 3 gig mp4... https://youtu.be/LX4__UW72f4

I dunno, what do you think? I think they're very comparable and the slightly better quality of the mkv is negligible. Especially at how much less time it takes to upload :) Let me know your opinion.
 
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DeMoN

Member
The quality is much more degraded because you upload just 1080p to youtube which gets horrible bitrate by them. On top of that youtube didnt give you a VP9 Encode of your video.
Use at least 2048x1152 and you get already 3-times the bitrate by youtube (but you need to get vp9 by them). I would use an other x264 frontend than handbrake though, because handbrake cant upscale. I assume you cant capture already higher.
Doom 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlw5X5k5zbE
Dirt Rally:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgOa5Yo5nGM
Switch to 1440p and you'll see - youtube can look good ;) It was even better before mid july 2016, but meh.
Keep in mind that I use a 16:10 monitor though (2560x1600).

Whatever you do - there is no reason to go to mp4. Handbrake should be able to output mkv too and the mkv container is much more reliable and supports much more formats too.
 
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HotelCharliHill

HotelCharliHill

Member
DeMoN said:
The quality is much more degraded because you upload just 1080p to youtube which gets horrible bitrate by them. On top of that youtube didnt give you a VP9 Encode of your video.
Use at least 2048x1152 and you get already 3-times the bitrate by youtube (but you need to get vp9 by them). I would use an other x264 frontend than handbrake though, because handbrake cant upscale. I assume you cant capture already higher.
Doom 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlw5X5k5zbE
Dirt Rally:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgOa5Yo5nGM
Switch to 1440p and you'll see - youtube can look good ;) It was even better before mid july 2016, but meh.
Keep in mind that I use a 16:10 monitor though (2560x1600).

Whatever you do - there is no reason to go to mp4. Handbrake should be able to output mkv too and the mkv container is much more reliable and supports much more formats too.
Click to expand...

You assume correctly. I play at 1080p on an LED 1080p TV monitor, AND I don't think my gaming PC is going to do over 1080p at higher settings either.

what's a VP9 Encode?

Also, I don't see MKV as a compatible file, https://support.google.com/youtube/troubleshooter/2888402?hl=en - but I guess I uploaded a file before.

Handbrake can't upscale? What would I need to upscale? 1080p to something else?
I wasn't saying 1080p didnn't look good. I think my 1080p recordings look just fine, almost as good as yours.
Handbrake CAN output mkv, yes, but will it be compressed adequately to upload in a reasonable timeframe? I like that I have nearly 1/10th the data to upload right now.

mkv is a much more reliable container and supports more formats. But what would I need that for? My understanding is it's great for post-production because it maintains separate audio tracks. But I don't do post-production and edit the heck out of my streams (although I'd love to make a "best of the week" 10 minute video) because I just don't have time to do all that. I stream 5 times a week for 3 hours AND have a job, AND am working on a non-profit project.
 
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DeMoN

Member
The container has nothing to do with filesizes. The filesizes are defined by the video and audio codec used and the settings you gave to them.
_
VP9 is an codec like H.264 and so on. Youtube encodes the videos into 2 variants. H.264, and the much better codec: VP9.
_
Forget the stupid google help. You could even upload .bik files. A format which many games use for their cutscenes. I uploaded almost 2000 videos in mkv now.
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How said: 1080p will look always bad on youtube. Also on your video very noticable - often very blurry ingame and compression artifacts. Thats why you should at least upscale your video to at least 2048x1152.
 
HotelCharliHill

HotelCharliHill

Member
DeMoN said:
The container has nothing to do with filesizes. The filesizes are defined by the video and audio codec used and the settings you gave to them.
_
VP9 is an codec like H.264 and so on. Youtube encodes the videos into 2 variants. H.264, and the much better codec: VP9.
_
Forget the stupid google help. You could even upload .bik files. A format which many games use for their cutscenes. I uploaded almost 2000 videos in mkv now.
_
How said: 1080p will look always bad on youtube. Also on your video very noticable - often very blurry ingame and compression artifacts. Thats why you should at least upscale your video to at least 2048x1152.
Click to expand...
Okay cool, so how do I encode to VP9 in a way that keeps the uploads around 5 gigs per hour of recorded video from the original mkv I save as? What software do you recommend and what settings? Will I need to upscale? I'm honestly not terribly interested in having VODs higher than 1080p. I know some people want thtat and appreciate that, but my viewership is much broader than that and I think most will be happy with 1080p. Thanks
 
Boildown

Boildown

Active Member
So I believe DeMoN is saying that if you upload a video at at least 2048x1152 resolution, YouTube will transcode it into VP9 in addition to H.264 format, and assign it more bitrate, as opposed to what happens if you upload it at 1920x1080 (H.264 only, less bitrate). So it might be worth a minor upscale in resolution to get that, even if upscaling is normally pointless.

If you're happy with your videos on YouTube as they are, don't worry about it, this would be a thing only for people who obsess over quality, imo.

One thing you can do is to upload to YouTube the largest file you can stand, and by that I mean highest bitrate, lowest CRF factor, or however you're doing it. YouTube (from what I've read) archives your original upload and as new compression technologies come out, will re-encode your video periodically to achieve better results than how they re-encoded it the first time. YouTube re-encodes absolutely everything they get, if you didn't know, there's no way to upload to YouTube in a way where they will post it as-is. So anyways, your video will stand the test of time better if you make the file you upload to YouTube as high quality as you can.
 
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