Magewell USB Capture HDMI 4K Plus

I'm running Fedora 29 on a Ryzen 7 with an ATI Vega 64. Because Wayland's video screen capture abilities are terrible, I wanted to capture the HDMI output of my computer and feed it back the USB port for screen recording.This device worked flawlessly right out of the box. I knew that USB had bandwidth limitations, so while my screen is 4K, I told obs (Open Broadcaster Software) to use V4L and the device showed up immediately with no fiddling required. All the different capture modes showed up as well in the resolution selection. So I was able to get 1080p at 30fps with full color and it just worked.Few hardware manufacturers are willing to put in the attention to detail in their software so that specialized driver tweaks are not needed to account for ways in which their specific piece of hardware fails to follow standards specifications. Magewell deserves huge props for not being a manufacturer who is willing to do the work. This is how all hardware should be.

Works like a charm (I'm hooking up a Canon XC15 to a Macbook Pro Touch). It's literally just plug and play. One side plugs into the camera's HDMI output, the other into the computer (through an Apple USB-C to USB-A adapter). You could probably eliminate the adapter with a USB-A to USB-C cable. Shows up as a webcam to the apps running on the mac. On the down side :(1) There's a fan (the circle with the Magewell logo on it is the fan vent). It's noisy enough that I can hear it. I put the thing in a box, but I'd much rather have a humongo heat sink and no fan. (2) There's a noticeable lag between real time and the output. I run my sound through the camera, so there's no audio/video synchronization problems, but this could be problematic if you were matching sound from the computer with the video. I ran their app and set the output resolution to 720P (the input from the camera is 4K), and that's helped a little, but hasn't eliminated the problem.

Bought this to be able to have a computer (Mac or PC) be able to connect directly to the Zoom Room via a HDMI cable. This box converts HDMI input to USB to go into the Zoom Room PC. Works fantastic. Zoom Room recognizes it as a computer and it could deal with screen resolutions. Expensive but recommend.

I used this product for the first time to do a tech rehearsal where I was on Zoom, Vimeo Live, as well as Stemyard.I had no problem with any of the platforms and even impressed the folks back at office with the fact that it played out so well. Now it's time to shoot the promo videos - gotta get done!

For 459 Dollars You would think this card would do what it is advertised to do. No Matter What software I have tried I can not seem to get this card to record at 4K @ 30 FPS. The problem is not the recording software it is with the card as I can not even get any software to display the 4K single (without recording) at 30FPS. It seem the USB 3 speeds are not enough to send an entire 4k single across and not have any frame drops.I can get around 20 FPS at best, but that is not acceptable quality at all. Same goes for 1440P I cant get more than 25-28 FPS. I will say however it does send video at 1080P @ 60 FPS perfectly fine, but if thats all I wanted I could have gone with a much cheaper capture card. Something around $150-$180, not $459!Plus It does not come with any recording software and doesn't work with too many third party recording software's out there. It really only works with streaming software but your not going to be able to stream in 4k. I have tried OBS on Windows 10, with the Nvenc codec (which uses your graphics card for compressing the recording) so it easily can handle and record what ever single it is being presented with. The problem again lies with the card, it can not get a 4k signal at 30 FPS to the computer at all.

This is a lot more of a flexible device than Elgato’s option Elgato Game Capture 4K60 Pro, 4K 60fps capture card with ultra-low latency technology for recording and streaming, PCIe x4, but for pure 4k60 recording, it just doesn’t live up to the same level.I had a kind of roller coaster of an experience with this capture device. At first I was super stoked for the possibilities of such a device, then bummed once I realized its limitations, and now I’m fairly evened out, happy with what it can do - I just wish it was a little cheaper. This dongle costs $450 - which is “affordable” in the 4k capture space, but given that it can’t actually record 4k60 (which I’ll cover in a bit), feels a bit much.This is a USB 3.0 device with a small silent fan to keep it cool. It’s got a nice design and is quite well-built. On one end you have the HDMI 2.0 input and passthrough output, and on the other, you have a 3.5mm headphone jack, microphone jack, and a full-size USB 3.0 port for the included male to male cable.One neat feature you might notice here, is that the Magewell 4K USB… blah blah… can act as a USB sound card. Within OBS Studio or your favorite recording program, you’ll have access to different audio devices for the HDMI input sound, microphone input sound, AND the system sound if you have that running to the headphone jack. Pretty neat! Plugging in headphones also gives you a direct no-latency output of your HDMI audio. It’s basically got a little mixer built-in. They have a capture utility - which I will touch on later - that let’s you adjust volume levels, too.With a 600mHz chip to process the HDMI, I had hoped it would support more - but I haven’t had luck with the high refresh rate support. I was able to push 1080p at 120hz to the card, but not 144hz and neither 120 or 144hz at 1440p. The card spec page says it can capture up to 120 fps below 1080p and up to 90fps above 1080p, but OBS Studio does not let you choose a framerate above 60, and you can’t manually type in a value anymore. But if you’re running a 120hz display, you might be alright. I have a 144hz panel coming in soon for testing where I can experiment further.Now, you can apparently import custom EDID settings to allow up to 1440p 144hz to be set as the input signal to this card - which, again, I can mess with once I have my 144hz monitor in the studio - but from what I’ve learned EDID messing around can get complicated and risky.The product also lists support for Rec.2020 and wide color gamut, which are required for HDR - but my PS4 Pro does not detect HDR support from it. It would only pass through HDR, not capture - BUT that would be a desirable feature if it worked. I have minimal experience with this and no actual HDR displays, so I can’t test further.Otherwise, you can send a 60hz signal through at up to 4k. 3840x2160 or 4096x2160 works. BUT USB 3.0 is NOT enough bandwidth to support an uncompressed 4k60 signal. If you try to pull a 4K signal from the card, it’s limited to 30FPS. I have a sample here - unfortunately a really good match that got kinda ruined - you can see it’s not quite even 30fps. Bandwidth limits it and it can’t sustain 30fps. This is where Magewell’s typically-included other features come in very handy. This card has onboard hardware de-interlacer, scaler, and so on. Drop the resolution of the device in OBS down to 1080p and you get a super smooth, and sharp, 60fps video feed. I tried doing 1440p, but that didn’t seem to be quite 60fps, either.This may sound awful - but it could work for a lot of people. The advantage of something like this card is your own PC hardware does not need to do the scaling. So if you’re just trying to stream your 4K input and don’t actually need a 4K signal being sent out, just processed from end to monitor, this is perfect. You can create a 1080p or 720p canvas and perform really well, even on some higher-end laptops.Or, considering the fact that most PS4 Pro and Xbox One X games aren’t running at a native 4K, you could jerry rig the recording setup. I also did some testing of setting the PS4 Pro to 4K output, setting the Magewell to scale down to 1080p, then setting OBS to upscale back to 4K and record a large bitrate with Nvenc, and the results are very impressive. Unless directly comparing, no one would know the difference on YouTube if you were actually capturing at 4K or not. Daisy-chaining the 4K60 Pro and Magewell card together since Amazon lost my HDMI splitter shipment, shows that, of course, the 4k60 Pro AT 4K is a tad bit sharper in some areas in the final 4k result - but you really only notice it in any significant way when you zoom in like 600x to look at text. Especially small red text, the native 4k Elgato capture is sharper than the Magewell scaled capture. But beyond that, it still looks amazing. No blocking or artifacting or anything like that. Plus, you can do this with many more setups due to it being USB.This sense of “flexibility” also extends to supporting non-standard input signals, such as the 5x line doubling mode from the Open Source Scan Converter, allowing me to create stunning 4k 60fps recordings of Playstation 1 games that look better than most emulator setups, while still using original hardware. The Elgato 4k60 pro always glitches out when used with the OSSC and I can’t seem to figure out why. So this is a pretty handy recording setup for some coverage and projects I have moving forward.This capture dongle supports Windows 7 and up, Mac OS X 10.9 and up, the new macOS 10.12 and Linux - specifically Ubuntu 12.04 and up or CentOS 7 or newer), as well as ChromeOS - with a easy UVC driver that also works with video calling apps.Magewell have also developed a “Capture Utility” for Windows, Mac, and Linux that allows you to control volume levels, adjust scaling, cropping, aspect ratios, and so on using the onboard FPGA processing chips, import custom EDID to get up to 1440p144hz support, convert color spaces, flip and mirror, and update firmware. Pretty awesome.Magewell have made a pretty powerful and flexible device. I really want to see this updated to support USB 3.2 over Type-C and maybe even Thunderbolt 3 (though we need desktop support for that to take off first) so we can remove some of the bandwidth limitations here. If you need native 4k 60fps raw captures, the Elgato 4k60 Pro is still a smarter buy, but I really feel that this dongle has a good place on the market.