Live Streaming - Camlink vs Capture cards.....

[Deleted member 44129]

This is not something I know a lot about but my 7 yr old has started getting into livestreaming... And by that I mean he wants to emulate the couple of minecraft youtubers that we deem "safe", but because of privacy concerns, he just streams on facebook to half a dozen family members who pretend they're watching and send him a couple of messages of encouragement.

I've been using OBS, and plugging the PS4 into an elgato camlink 4k. It sort of does the job, but I have to turn the settings on the stream down to 1080 30fps to get a decent frame rate. If I buy a proper capture card such as an Elgato HD60 do I actually gain any quality/framerate ? Are they essentially the same thing? I've been googling and I don't really get what the difference is. Is there some processing going on in the HD60 that a camlink doesnt do?

 

[Deleted member 5334]

Just doing a quick check and they... look about the same. . .?

I know one of the USB 3.0 capture cards has Low Latency Mode (which effectively lowers it to levels more players wouldn't notice). I also think they may also have a "No-Lag/Real Time" mode as well. I think the HD60 may have an HDMI Pass-through to TV, that said. Other-wise, not much of a difference?

I use an Aver Media HD Live Gamer 2 (which has a more technical term but I'm blanking on the name), which is a PCI Capture Card. But I know some friends who use the USB 3.0 El Gato Capture cards and I know they do the job well enough.

EDIT: The only thing I could suggest is when you feed it into OBS, is see if you can lower the capture resolution.

Question, what are you feeding into it, signal wise? 4K? 1080p?

 

[Deleted member 44129]

Just doing a quick check and they... look about the same. . .?

I know one of the USB 3.0 capture cards has Low Latency Mode (which effectively lowers it to levels more players wouldn't notice). I also think they may also have a "No-Lag/Real Time" mode as well. I think the HD60 may have an HDMI Pass-through to TV, that said. Other-wise, not much of a difference?

I use an Aver Media HD Live Gamer 2 (which has a more technical term but I'm blanking on the name), which is a PCI Capture Card. But I know some friends who use the USB 3.0 El Gato Capture cards and I know they do the job well enough.

Click to shrink...

Regarding the pass through, I had an HDMI splitter knocking about.... The PS4 sends HDMI to the TV and the iMac simultaneously. iMac takes the video, slaps my boy onto the bottom right of the image (got a green screen), and then streams to FB. So yeah, a capture card has a pass through, but I'm already working around that limitation.

Not sure why my (fairly powerful) imac is struggling to put out a decent stream though. The frame rate is shite unless I turn the bitrate down and limit the framerate. Oh, and I also turn the PS4 down to 1080p.

 

[Deleted member 5334]

Regarding the pass through, I had an HDMI splitter knocking about.... The PS4 sends HDMI to the TV and the iMac simultaneously. iMac takes the video, slaps my boy onto the bottom right of the image (got a green screen), and then streams to FB. So yeah, a capture card has a pass through, but I'm already working around that limitation.

Click to shrink...

Gotcha.

I wonder if there is a CPU and/or Capture Card limitation of some sort going on. If I have too many tasks going on at once, sometimes my Capture Card will "Sputter" a bit.

EDIT: I saw you responded with an update.

Question. OBS has an option to off-load the encoding to your GPU (such as Intel Encoding, Nvidia Encoding, and AMD Encoding). I know some iMac's have dedicated GPU's on them, so is that an option for you? That may help out immensely. You may need specific drivers to download, but I know that's an option. I'm on Windows, mind, so OBS's options may be slightly different for you.

 

[Deleted member 44129]

Gotcha.

I wonder if there is a CPU and/or Capture Card limitation of some sort going on. If I have too many tasks going on at once, sometimes my Capture Card will "Sputter" a bit.

EDIT: I saw you responded with an update.

Question. OBS has an option to off-load the encoding to your GPU (such as Intel Encoding, Nvidia Encoding, and AMD Encoding). I know some iMac's have dedicated GPU's on them, so is that an option for you? That may help out immensely. You may need specific drivers to download, but I know that's an option. I'm on Windows, mind, so OBS's options may be slightly different for you.

Click to shrink...

Interesting, I'll go google it, thanks.

 

[Akai]

A H60 Pro does have an onboard H.264 encoder, so it might help? Not sure, though.

Anyways, I know you are not streaming on Twitch, but they have a helpful page with recommended settings for different target resolutions. Maybe compare these with your OBS settings and see if you can optimize it this way. This completely depends on your PC/Laptop specs, so it might not be possible. Good luck either way.

 

[Bishop89]

This topic interests me deeply

 

[shadowhaxor]

This is not something I know a lot about but my 7 yr old has started getting into livestreaming... And by that I mean he wants to emulate the couple of minecraft youtubers that we deem "safe", but because of privacy concerns, he just streams on facebook to half a dozen family members who pretend they're watching and send him a couple of messages of encouragement.

I've been using OBS, and plugging the PS4 into an elgato camlink 4k. It sort of does the job, but I have to turn the settings on the stream down to 1080 30fps to get a decent frame rate. If I buy a proper capture card such as an Elgato HD60 do I actually gain any quality/framerate ? Are they essentially the same thing? I've been googling and I don't really get what the difference is. Is there some processing going on in the HD60 that a camlink doesnt do?

Click to shrink...

Oh, where to begin.....

OK, so, the camlink is just your basic HDMI passthrough with UVC (USB Video Class) driver support so that it can work with various cameras/camcorders. It's a simplified capture device and nothing more. For those looking for something similar but cheaper, check out the BlueAVS Audio Video Capture Card on Amazon. It's weird that you have to drop it down to fo 1080p30, as it supports 1080p60. I'd test it, but I no longer have one (long story).

As for a direct comparison, the Camlink is basically the HD60 S. The only main difference is UVC support since you need that for various different cameras, and no passthrough support to connect it to a monitor/TV. The HD60 has the HDMI passthrough, 3.5mm audio port so you can use it to input audio or chat. When you plug in the Camlink it gets detected as a webcam, where the HD60 gets detected as a USB recording device. That will pose some issues for recording software, like skype.

In short, they're similar, just marketed for different uses.

**Update** for those asking about the onboard encoder, that only comes into play when you're using the device to stream/capture. The camlink doesn't have this as all it is doing is sending a signal to the PC, so the PC does the heavy lifting. Similar to another of capture cards that also don't have onboard encoding.

For GPU encoding, that' another rabbit hole, but ok. So I don't recommend AMD's GPU encoding at all, not vs x264/cpu encoding. It's trash and AMD hasn't made any major changes to fix it. If you have an Nvidia RTX, they support the NVENC (Nvidia encoding) and are basically neck and neck, or in several cases, superior to CPU encoding as it is only a 3-4% impact to the GPU, while not touching the CPU at all.

In short = If you have an RTX, always use NVENC New over x264. Don't bother with AMD or Intel encoding atm.

 

[Deleted member 44129]

Oh, where to begin.....

OK, so, the camlink is just your basic HDMI passthrough with UVC (USB Video Class) driver support so that it can work with various cameras/camcorders. It's a simplified capture device and nothing more. For those looking for something similar but cheaper, check out the BlueAVS Audio Video Capture Card on Amazon. It's weird that you have to drop it down to fo 1080p30, as it supports 1080p60. I'd test it, but I no longer have one (long story).

As for a direct comparison, the Camlink is basically the HD60 S. The only main difference is UVC support since you need that for various different cameras, and no passthrough support to connect it to a monitor/TV. The HD60 has the HDMI passthrough, 3.5mm audio port so you can use it to input audio or chat. When you plug in the Camlink it gets detected as a webcam, where the HD60 gets detected as a USB recording device. That will pose some issues for recording software, like skype.

In short, they're similar, just marketed for different uses.

**Update** for those asking about the onboard encoder, that only comes into play when you're using the device to stream/capture. The camlink doesn't have this as all it is doing is sending a signal to the PC, so the PC does the heavy lifting.

For GPU encoding, that' another rabbit hole, but ok. So I don't recommend AMD's GPU encoding at all, not vs x264/cpu encoding. It's trash and AMD hasn't made any major changes to fix it. If you have an Nvidia RTX, they support the NVENC (Nvidia encoding) and are basically neck and neck, or in several cases, superior to CPU encoding as it is only a 3-4% impact to the GPU, while not touching the CPU at all.

In short = If you have an RTX, always use NVENC New over x264. Don't bother with AMD or Intel encoding atm.

Click to shrink...

Great info, thanks.

 

[Deleted member 44129]

I've tried streaming today on my slightly old macbook pro. Wouldnt get a decent framerate at all. Plugged it via the imac, and we're doing 1080 30fps 4000 bitrate. Looks alright on facebook. :)

 

[Deleted member 44129]

Well, someone's having a whale of a time!

 

[hachikoma]

I regularly use a Camlink 4k for 1080p60 streaming from an A7III, so any framerate issues shouldn't be the fault of the device itself. It's likely that the bottleneck is on the compositing/encoding side.