Elgato HD60 Pro

I’m now setup to stream/record PS3 using the Elgato HD60 Pro

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Last year I acquired a PS3 for $10; this included two controllers and their cables, two HDMI cables, and a copy of GTA4 I’ll never use. I figured for that kind of money it would be worth grabbing it to play games that never quite made it to any other platform, plus it’s a first generation PS3 capable of playing games going back to the PS2 and PS1. I tend to stick to emulators still, like with Klonoa for example, but you never know… it could come in handy.

After getting my hands on it I was interested in the idea of possibly streaming gameplay on the rare chance something like that could happen. But upon researching I found that could be problematic as the console has HDCP encryption preventing you from streaming or recording to an external device unless you record via composite. Unfortunately I have an Elgato HD60 Pro which only supports HDMI, and I was not going to invest in yet another capture device, especially since I don’t really use it much anymore thanks to AMD’s AVC Encoder in OBS Studio.

But I didn’t give up! I found out through continued research that using an HDMI splitter would do the trick just fine (as seen above), but not all HDMI splitters will do the job. I picked up this model on Amazon, and that bypasses the HDCP encryption perfectly. So all you really need to get it to work with your HD60 Pro is one HDMI splitter and three HDMI cables. One to go from the PS3 to the splitter, one to go from the splitter to your monitor/TV, and one to go to from the splitter to your capture card. Definitely much cheaper than getting another unit all together.

Plus, as you can see I’ve already got a game lined up. :v:

What I’ve learned about the Elgato HD60 Pro

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elgato2

The Elgato HD60 Pro has been a bit of a learning curve. One of the reasons I haven’t been posting lately is due to my desire to get the best stream/recording combo up and running, and believe me when I say there have been some bugs that needed a good thwarting.

One issue I ran into prevented me from recording if I had flashback mode disabled. At first I thought it had to do with how I had the Elgato plugged into my GPU, when the entire time it was actually my audio.

xfi

I have a Creative XFi sound card with a ton of plugin options, and I noticed the software seemed a bit confused when it came to establishing which port was ok and what wasn’t. So I disabled everything but what I intended to use and all of a sudden the program started to let me record.

However my worries weren’t laid to rest as I encountered yet another bug was discovered while recording. The audio would have frequent skips throughout the final mp4 as though there was a buffering problem. After more intense experimentation I found a solution, record the game audio separately from the video. This gives me three different files:

  • The Mp4 file
  • Commentary Audio (if needed)
  • Game Audio

For some reason recording separately vs mixed streams outputs a better quality result. Which I’m ok with since I can just compile the footage in premiere anyway as well as tweak each audio file to my liking if needed.

However…

After about 18 to 20 minutes in the video will suddenly have video/audio latency issues that cannot be fixed. So what I have to do is record in increments of about 15 minutes to play it safe, which honestly isn’t that big of a deal to me. In FRAPS and even in OBS I’ve always stopped and started to make shorter files as an old habit. If I have to continue this practice I don’t see a reason to rage.

Now onto streaming. Twitch has been rather fickle, but that’s before I even bought the card. YouTube on the other hand has been really seamless, whatever I throw at it will stick. I streamed Dead Island while recording a local copy with zero framerate loss. The only problem I had was when I went to stop and start recording the game capture HD program didn’t want to behave, but that seemed to be related to Dead Island from what I can tell, as I tried to interact with other applications on my 2nd monitor and it outright refused until I brought up my task manager (revealing an adorable Stewie Kitten on live stream to my audience of 1).

I think I finally have it figured out enough to get started on proper recording again. If things continue to go smoothly I’ll do a YouTube video review of the hardware and address on the issues I’ve had to lick, on the chance that someone might be in a similar position with audio issues.

Open Thread at the witching hour

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Alright, I’m feeling well enough to post again. Felt kinda bleh in one form or another but hopefully it’s all passed.

Been experimenting with video streaming with the Elgato HD60 Pro to Twitch. My first run with it the other day was a little strange when my stream kept randomly traveling at the speed of cocaine, but tonight it went a bit smoother. Think I need to bump up the bitrate though to make it look a little more crisp. Also did a local recording at the same time the stream took place, no problems.

I’ll also be looking into YouTube streaming soon. It requires a phone number but that’s ok, I’ll be obtaining a flip phone that’ll do the job among other things. Honestly I would prefer to do my public streaming on Twitch, but YouTube seems to have a better setup. They don’t require Adobe Flash, you can stream at 60fps if your bandwidth can handle it, Twitch requires you to be partnered to always get good bandwidth while YouTube will take whatever bitrate you throw at them and the list goes on… I really wish Amazon would pay more attention to the streaming market, they’ve owned twitch for awhile now and it would be really nice if they offered better competition with YouTube/Google.

The Elgato has arrived!

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I’ve been playing with my new capture card since yesterday, it came a few days early! I finally have it all dialed in.

Elgato

The software isn’t that difficult to use, if you’re familiar to OBS there will be some similarities. I think the bigger problem I had was figuring out what inputs to use since I have multiple options, mainly trying to get mumble chat into the recordings. I finally perfected it tonight. Now I can simultaneously stream and record footage at the same time. Works perfectly for what I want. I’ve been testing it with all kinds of games. From Skyrim to TF2 to Hard Reset Redux to Solus Project, it handles it all without stealing any of my framerate so I can record/broadcast and enjoy my game at the same time. It was never really bad with Skyrim, but sometimes with the other games OBS was a little more demanding. That and I always had to choose between streaming and recording. While I could do both it would make me lag considerably even on good hardware.

It was nice running a UE4 game and doing a capture without worrying about a performance decrease. I think when Obduction comes out I’ll be able to capture my finest moments of stupidity in glorious 1080p 60FPS for all to cry at. 😀