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n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 10:27 am
by Chrispy_
Hey all,

I'm out of my depth with video capture cards these days. Last time I dabbled in it was in the analogue Hauphage WinTV days :\

A quick search in the Visual Haven thread doesn't seem to give me any obvious stickies on the subject, so just pretend I am a video-capture n00b (alarmingly close to the truth) and that I want a simple system to get 1080p 60fps live video stream (piped out from a GoPro Hero 3 via HDMI) captured to a PC.

What, my dear gerbils, would I need?

Cheers!

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 10:45 am
by ludi
You will probably be needing something like this, and an input card that accepts analog composite signal sources.

There may be another solution, but the content-protection provisions within HDMI make them somewhat hard to come by.

Any particular reason for streaming it, instead of just uploading the data from the camera in the usual way?

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 10:58 am
by Chrispy_
ludi wrote:
Any particular reason for streaming it, instead of just uploading the data from the camera in the usual way?


The camera will be permanently fixed in a very hard to reach place (top corner of a squash court) and wired up with cables to a more accessible room next door. The primary output will be to a television, we were planning on using an HDMI passthrough to also allow the feed to be recorded by a standalone PVR or PC with capture hardware.

The only important thing is 1080p60

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 11:08 am
by TheEmrys
Why not just use an eye-fi SD card in your GoPro? It'll allow you to access everything over your wifi. They show up on woot every month or so for pretty good deals.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 11:14 am
by Chrispy_
TheEmrys wrote:
Why not just use an eye-fi SD card in your GoPro? It'll allow you to access everything over your wifi. They show up on woot every month or so for pretty good deals.


Oh, didn't know about those. It's not ideal because it means you can't stream matches anymore, but it'd work for coaching sessions at least.
More suggestions, keep 'em coming... :)

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 11:55 am
by BooTs
I use a card similar to this: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6815100098 for capture, but my card doesn't support 1080p, where this card does.

There is also this card that has built-in hardware accelerated encoding: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6815100100

If you do have some issue with HDCP (hdmi based copy protection) then you can usually overcome that in software pretty easily. In my case I use the avermedia software to view the HDMI input and then capture that screen using Xsplit (other softwares work the same) and can record and stream from there.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Sun Apr 21, 2013 4:15 am
by jihadjoe
Got this link from the Anandtech forums where someone asked a similar question:
http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/intensity/

Avermedia is also quite popular among console game streamers:
http://www.avermedia.com/avertv/product ... spx?id=499

HDCP shouldnt be a problem since you're capturing from a camera. Also, that DVI capture card Scott mentioned in the FCAT article might be of interest if you don't need the audio.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Sun Apr 21, 2013 7:16 am
by vargis14
!080p @ 60fps is a lot of data for wireless. I cannot see it not skipping. A bluray disc can saturate a wifi n connection.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2013 6:14 pm
by TheEmrys
vargis14 wrote:
!080p @ 60fps is a lot of data for wireless. I cannot see it not skipping. A bluray disc can saturate a wifi n connection.


It would be an issue for a live stream, but if you are doing coaching from it, you'll just set it up to copy over every night at the end of the day.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2013 6:32 pm
by Airmantharp
Browsing through the above links, it looks like nothing supports 1080p60; and that's kind of sad. More work!

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 9:22 am
by Chrispy_
Yeah, thanks for the suggestions chaps but like Airmantharp said, nothing is what I need (which is 1080p60).

1080p30 is totally useless for sports where you have a tiny ball moving at over 150mph.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 9:35 am
by just brew it!
Even 60 FPS seems marginal for something moving that fast. You're starting to get up into the realm where a specialized high speed camera is needed.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 10:08 am
by Usacomp2k3
How about 720p/60?

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 11:37 am
by Chrispy_
just brew it! wrote:
Even 60 FPS seems marginal for something moving that fast. You're starting to get up into the realm where a specialized high speed camera is needed.


We have a specialist high-speed camera. We just need to capture from it - 1080p60 is the minimum acceptable quality, with 1440p 48 being preferred but obviously much more demanding of bandwidth and not an HDMI-compatible resolution/framerate.

720p60 is smooth enough but squash balls are quite small and a wide-angle lens is used to cover the whole court, making the extra clarity of 1080p a significant improvement. 720p120 wasn't much better tha 720p60 and 640x480@240fps was beautiful but useless ;)

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 12:02 pm
by Darkmage
BooTs wrote:
If you do have some issue with HDCP (hdmi based copy protection) then you can usually overcome that in software pretty easily. In my case I use the avermedia software to view the HDMI input and then capture that screen using Xsplit (other softwares work the same) and can record and stream from there.
Not to derail the thread, but why would the output from a helmet cam be copy protected?

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 3:20 pm
by Chrispy_
I think the point was not that camera output would be crippled with HDCP but that there was a lack of such products on the market in general, because of HDCP issues for almost everything else that has an HDMI port.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 3:37 pm
by Usacomp2k3
What's your budget. How about something like this:
DeckLink Mini Recorder
http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/decklink/uses/
or this:
http://www.amazon.com/AVERMEDIA-Broadca ... B006T8QCYA

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 4:01 pm
by Airmantharp
Usacomp2k3 wrote:
What's your budget. How about something like this:
DeckLink Mini Recorder
http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/decklink/uses/
or this:
http://www.amazon.com/AVERMEDIA-Broadca ... B006T8QCYA


Only the top-end Decklink $1000 part (built for 4K) can do 1080p60; the Avermedia is still recording 1080p30 when fed 60FPS.

I don't see why this is so hard... recording HDMI should be a fairly simple affair.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 4:10 pm
by Usacomp2k3
Airmantharp wrote:
Only the top-end Decklink $1000 part (built for 4K) can do 1080p60; the Avermedia is still recording 1080p30 when fed 60FPS.

I don't see why this is so hard... recording HDMI should be a fairly simple affair.

Bugger. Oh well.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 4:18 pm
by just brew it!
Airmantharp wrote:
I don't see why this is so hard... recording HDMI should be a fairly simple affair.

The raw stream represents nearly 400 MB/sec of data. Any way you slice it, that's not easy to deal with. It is more bandwidth than a PCIe x1 slot, a gigabit Ethernet connection, or a mechanical hard drive; doing real-time video compression at that resolution and frame rate is also difficult.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 4:29 pm
by Airmantharp
just brew it! wrote:
Airmantharp wrote:
I don't see why this is so hard... recording HDMI should be a fairly simple affair.

The raw stream represents nearly 400 MB/sec of data. Any way you slice it, that's not easy to deal with. It is more bandwidth than a PCIe x1 slot, a gigabit Ethernet connection, or a mechanical hard drive; doing real-time video compression at that resolution and frame rate is also difficult.


I don't disagree that recording 60FPS in 1080p is difficult, but even that ~400MB/s rate can be managed with consumer equipment, as in:

1. Two decent SSD's in RAID-0 could easily handle the data rate if RAW recording was necessary
2. Nearly all motherboards feature a 4x slot in addition to the 16x slot used for graphics
3. Modern GPUs (of any real caliber), modern CPUs and Intel's Quicksync all have the capability of encoding the stream in real-time

I just think that it's a lack of demand, where 1080p60 is rarely used in the consumer space for user generated content.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 5:06 pm
by Chrispy_
The funny thing is that a GoPro Hero 3 Black can record AND encode 1080p60 to H264 for hours using BATTERIES in a tiny device that weighs nothing! :)

It's sad that no affordable capture card can do 1080p60 when that's been the standard screen res/vsync rate for at least half a decade now.
It's even sadder because an underpowered device like the GoPro can encode 1440p48 (that's hugely demanding!) to H.264 on battery power using a tiny little chip that costs peanuts in the grand scheme of things....

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 5:23 pm
by Captain Ned
Let me just inject that some 30 years after entering college I still have my college squash racquet, but no place to use it.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 7:39 pm
by cesma
Here is the card you seek:
http://www.sknet-web.co.jp/english/mvxx ... ation.html
should be ~600$

and here is a related thread
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/3513 ... mendations

Sourcing it in the US might be hard though...

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 9:08 pm
by Airmantharp
Using the second link provided by Cesna above: this HDC-301E-R10 does 1080p60 capture to H.264 for $369 shipped, apparently in stock. Also has an HDMI pass-through, though it looks like it's as bare-bones as you can get. Want to be a guinea pig Chrispy?

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 9:59 pm
by jihadjoe
that link: "sknet-web.co.jp"...
i read as
skynet-web.co.jp

and thought that the japanese had built skynet already.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 10:17 pm
by drsauced
Our recording studio has been using Decklink Studio (and SDI) to output to a Decklink Intensity Pro card for streaming. The Decklink cards are very stable, and that is worth a lot. We also do h.264 and AVCHD encoding (and MainConcept for regular DVD's), and these import fine into Sony Vegas Pro for editing. Of course 1080p60 is better for editing, but the file sizes and bitrates are crushing, even for SSD, which we record directly to from the cameras.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 10:35 pm
by just brew it!
Chrispy_ wrote:
The funny thing is that a GoPro Hero 3 Black can record AND encode 1080p60 to H264 for hours using BATTERIES in a tiny device that weighs nothing! :)

Heh, that *is* impressive (assuming it isn't riddled with compression artifacts that decrease the effective resolution). I imagine most of the cost is the chip that does the motion video capture/encoding. So logic dictates that you ought to be able to produce a basic 1080p HDMI to H.264 capture card for somewhat less than the cost of the Hreo 3 Black. Which is exactly what Airmantharp's link appears to be.

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2013 11:05 pm
by Deanjo

Re: n00b help required: Video capture from HDMI input

Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2013 6:11 am
by Chrispy_
Perfect, I think we're getting there \o/

Cheap capture card with HDMI to H.264 using hardware encoder.

H.264 streaming to disk is good, rather than 900GB of raw data per hour. I'll pass this on and see what comes of it :)