Elgato HD60 S Review

Some months ago I was wondering if Elgato was ever going to tackle an external USB3 card, I got my answer some weeks later. I've had the card for about 5 weeks now, enough time to give a good insight into it.

So what exactly is the HD60 S? Well to put it in simple terms, it's an external Elgato HD60 Pro that I recently reviewed. It's really great for the laptop market or for those who own a desktop but don't want to fiddle about with internal installation.

The build quality feels really nice and what you would expect from Elgato. It's slightly smaller than the original Game Capture HD design and seems equal to the original HD60.

System Requirements

I want to quickly discuss the official system requirements from Elgato as there are two main points I want to talk about.

PC: Windows 10 (64-bit)

4th generation quad‑core Intel Core i5 CPU (i5-4xxx or comparable)

Intel HD or NVIDIA GeForce 600 series graphics (or better)

4 GB RAM, built-in USB 3.0 port

Those are not particularly high specifications for most systems these days but they are still modest. The reason for this is the HD60 S does not feature an on board H.264 encoder like the HD60 Pro so the encoding is done on your system.

Some people might be confused about the OS compatibility. Windows 10 is preferred but it will also work fine on 8.1 and 7. In fact I was using 8.1 so don't feel like you need Windows 10 to use the card.

Software and video quality

The Game Capture software hasn't changed much from the HD60 Pro, solid and steady as ever with the HD60 S. It's just simple and easy to understand that will take you maybe 10 or 15 minutes to get the hang of.

One thing I found interesting is that they chose to change the maximum bit rate to 40Mbps when the Pro was 60. They probably did this due to on board encoding as discussed previously.

Like other Elgato cards, you are still stuck with YV12 (4:2:0) capture but this really doesn't mean much when most media you create is streamed in YV12 or converted to YV12 by YouTube anyway. If you really want YUY2 (4:2:2), you would need to look into using the DirectShow driver described below. Here is a 1080p60 40Mbps sample from the Elgato software for your viewing pleasure.

Although the card is basically made for 1080p60, they have not forgot about other common resolutions. The HD60 S officially supports 1080p60, 1080p30, 1080i, 720p60, 720p30, 576p, 576i and 480p.

One really cool change in the software since 3.10.65 has been the non splitting of .ts files once the file size hit 4GB. I should note that file splitting still occurs if you use flashback recording.

The HD60 S also has support for Elgato Sound Capture and you know how much I love that.

Drivers and OBS/XSplit Compatibility

Like the HD60 Pro, Elgato is supplying two drivers for the HD60 S. One is tailor made to add functionality on a product by product basis and the other is a run of the mill DirectShow driver that unlocks the YUY2 functionality as described above. I see no reason to use the DirectShow driver as the one they bundle with the Game Capture software will work with OBS and XSplit anyway. You would only really be missing out on AmaRecTV support.

As of writing, the HD60 S comes fully working with OBS using either driver. However, XSplit will require an update to be used with the non DirectShow driver. If you require immediate access to the HD60 S in XSplit, I recommend you install the DirectShow driver by clicking here. I'll update this when XSplit has rolled out support for it.

Click to enlarge

USB3 Bandwidth and Preview Latency

The HD60 S seems to be using the CY3014 USB3 chipset and I'm glad they did. It has shown how stable it is at processing 1080p60 video on other cards using the same chipset (XCAPTURE-1 and the USB3HDCAP). It was a good decision to keep it and not go down the road of other devices plagued by issues such as the Intensity Shuttle.

Due to this, preview latency is kept as low as most internal cards. For my Asus laptop, it seems to be always 2 frames and should be fine to play from. Of course this number depends on your system so it might be 3-4 frames on slower systems or closer to 1 on high end rigs. You definitely won't need to fiddle with microphone offset that's for sure.

Conclusions

A shorter review than normal but that's my style with reviews. I want to give a quick description of the product and then highlight any key points or things I think need improved. The fact this review is short shows how good the card is. If you do consider buying this, you are getting exactly what you pay for. A USB3 external card capable of easily capturing 1080p60 video and anything in between. 

Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4K (1080p60 and 2160p30)

Announced mid February 2015, the new Blackmagic 4K now arrives.

It supports 1080p60 RGB capture and up to 2160p30 at 4:2:2. One of my main problems with the old Intensity Pro was that 480p was not supported over Component, this is now fixed.

People will be comparing this to the Micomsoft SC-512 so we can do a quick pros and cons list.

Intensity Pro 4K

Supports Deep Color output. Due to this, no other capture card can rival the quality outputted by this device. In a real world scenario though, I'm unsure of whether this will actually be beneficial as most stuff will just end up on YouTube.

It's $200 (or £135 according to the site). That's absolutely insane value.

Has passthrough. I'm unsure of whether it will function like the old Intensity and the tech specs don't mention it doing 4:4:4 to 4:2:2 processing. It looks like it might be lagless.

Supports 7.1 audio capture. This is always absent on cards of this price.

If it's like the old Intensity, it won't capture Full range content. I'll need to have the driver and the actual hardware to know for sure. I'm guessing since it supports Deep Color, they did support it.

The drivers can be flaky but obviously this can improve with time.

Obviously no 240p support but that's easily worked around with a GV-USB2 or similar.

Micomsoft SC-512

The Blackmagic crushes it in price and availability.

We know for sure the passthrough is lagless but so might this new Blackmagic.

Ability to capture via VGA so retro console RGB capture is possible. Anyone really into retro gaming has an upscaler so doesn't really matter.

Drivers are currently way better than Blackmagic.

Summary

What's now known as the best capture card completely depends on what you personally need. Both products are great but right now I have to side with the Intensity. That price point and features is bordering on absolute insanity.

Update:

So this is turning into trainwreck city for Blackmagic. 5 days ago I emailed Blackmagic some questions. Yes... 5 days ago. Today I got a reply.

"We aim to respond to all email queries within 1 working day"... I see.

Here are my original questions.

1. Does the passthrough operate the same way as the old Intensity Pro where it was converted to 4:2:2 on output and thus introduced some lag? Is it now 4:4:4 output and lag free? If so, what happened to Component to HDMI lag?

2. With other DirectShow software, are you able to select 4:2:2 HDYC for non UltraHD resolutions or is it always going to be RGB?

3. Will the new card support 0-255 Full range? The old Intensity only supported 16-235.

The reply:

thanks of your email,

1) I will ask the developer team whether the pass through is 10bit RGB or re negotiated
2)The UHD is always YUV
3)the card support 0-255

My impressions:

It's just as quick as they can reply it seems with 2 mistakes. "of your" instead of "for your" and "support" instead of "supports". Just looks really unprofessional.

Question 1 wasn't even answered and I bet you I don't get a follow up email to clarify. How did answer 2 help? The only answer I got was from 3 but they haven't explained how you would do this as there's no configuration to select this. I honestly may aswell not even have emailed. I'd stay away from Blackmagic.

1080p60 with AMV2 and AMV4 codecs

Before I get started, this will probably be my last post of the year so Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I got a message from a reader asking to test AMV2 and AMV4 with 1080p60, so here goes. To get a fair comparison with my other 1080p60 battle article, I'll only test the lossless modes.

I'll talk about AMV2 first. Here's the basic configuration you would use for YUY2 Lossless capture.

R1: Speed is just a total nightmare. I managed to screenshot one of the data rates that popped up. Click to enlarge all pictures.

With a single drive and even with a 512 buffer size, these data rates are too much. The preview window will become very laggy and inserted frames begin. The R2: Standard mode is no different. 20 seconds in and we are already dropping frames. Luckily we never come close to any data rates of R1.

Knowing this there is no point in trying Y1 and we will just move straight to Y2: Standard.

Leave it capturing for about 30 seconds and the same issues will occur.

AMV2 Conclusion: It's just simply old and was never meant to handle such resolutions. Perfectly fine for SD and probably 720p.

Now let's talk about AMV4. It was released earlier this year so it should have been designed to handle such resolutions.

Let's go for DY2:Standard.

CPU usage is pretty much exactly the same as MagicYuv, but the data rates are slightly more (what I show is one of the peaks). However, absolutely no dropped frames and stable preview window.

Now let's look at DY3:High compress.

CPU usage doubles but the bit rate on average lowers by about 20%. Is that a good trade off? Yes. Definitely my preferred mode. However, it's now just a worse MagicYuv.

AMV4 Conclusion: A much preferred alternative to AMV2 but it's still just worse than MagicYuv and nowhere near x264vfw. These codecs also require you to pay to remove a watermark on the videos.

That's not really the issues though. The main people who read my blog are speedrunners and these codecs are not viable since the source is closed and will never be implemented into FFmpeg. This means the videos will not work when you import them into SDA submission programs like Yua. For now I'd still stick to x264vfw.

1080p60 Battle (MagicYUV vs x264vfw)

I've known about MagicYUV for quite some time but never really paid much attention to it. I decided to look on the website and it makes some interesting claims:

"It provides faster-than-realtime performance for FullHD and 4K resolutions on contemporary PC hardware. Multi-threaded by design enabling efficient utilization of multi-core CPUs. This combined with an advanced SSE optimized coder/decoder engine makes MagicYUV one of the fastest mathematically lossless video codecs of it's kind."

Sounds quite interesting, doesn't it? I thought so to. I decided to compare it to the July 2014 x264vfw build to see if these claims were true. Firstly, here is the configuration and setup. We'll be using a 1080p60 capture card (YUY2) and an Xbox 360. AmaRecTV will be the capture program. The system in question is nothing fancy. An old i5 2500k, 8GB RAM and a dedicated internal WD Black 1TB hard drive for capture. Below are the codec configurations.

During initial testing, I was unable to have MagicYUV keep a stable frame rate when the buffer size was set to 128 in AmaRecTV. x264vfw also had this issue with --keyint 1 applied. This buffer size is just too small when dealing with such high data rates and real time compression. To give each codec a chance, I set the buffer size to the maximum 512 to mitigate hard drive bottle necking. This thankfully lead to no further issues and testing was much easier.

First let's talk about how x264vfw performed. If you read my previous posts, you know what I am going to say. It just works. If you want even better compression ratios you can disable/enable the --keyint value. Setting this to 10 gives a fair trade off between editing accuracy and compression. Only in very high motion scenes will x264vfw even come close to MagicYUV. Most of the time it's not even close. Please pay close attention to the CPU usage figure in the below screenshot (click to enlarge).

Now let's move onto MagicYUV. The claim of being the fastest lossless codec is definitely true... and they are true by a huge margin. It knocks every other true lossless codec out of the park that I tested months ago in my 1080p60 lossless article.

That 24% is not just a low reading. That 24% stays no matter what content you capture. I've seen it peak to 25% once but that was it. That's pretty amazing actually. Even x264vfw at lower CRF values has a hard time beating that. The only problem is well... not a problem. It's just like every other true lossless codec in that the data rates are always high. Compare the file sizes of the above screenshots. With x264vfw I've captured over 5 minutes and just about to hit 19 GB. I've not even hit 4 minutes with MagicYUV and I'm already close to 22 GB.

In conclusion, MagicYUV performs really well but personally I feel it still falls slightly short of x264vfw. The sheer configuration options available in x264vfw is what swings it for me. Not only that but MagicYUV is currently not part of FFmpeg. This means it won't import into popular encoding programs like nate's Yua for SDA speedrun submission. However, if it does get integrated into FFmpeg and compression ratios improve I will definitely consider MagicYUV over x264vfw.

1080p60 Capture over USB2

I thought it would be quite interesting to see what kind of quality you could capture at data rates for USB 2. There are two main reasons I thought of this idea. Not everybody has the knowledge or confidence to install an internal hard drive. Additionally, some people may just have an external hard drive that only has a USB 2 connection.

The best codec for this has to be x264vfw. Not only does this give us the best compression ratio, it will also allow us to modify the CRF value in order to hit the data rates we need. USB 2 advertises 480 Mb/s but you will never get close to this. A more realistic target is 200 Mb/s. For the testing process, I was looking for a quantizer value that would never go above a peak bit rate of 200 Mb/s regardless of the scene. Like my lossless comparison, Super Street Fighter IV is the source material.

 After thorough testing, this is my configuration:

Click to enlarge

I settled on a CRF value of 16. I was able to set the CRF to 14 but I was getting ever so close to 200 Mb/s. You might be asking, why not just use 14 then? The problem is that the 1080p60 material I own is very limited. There might be material other people have where they do go over 200 Mb/s with the 14 value. Choosing a slightly higher value means that even if people do find a harder to compress scene, it is still likely going to be under 200 Mb/s. I should reinforce I am talking about peak bit rates here. It is very uncommon that you will even go near 160 Mb/s.

You may also see I have enabled extra command line use (--keyint 1). This is to improve frame seeking in Sony Vegas and similar editing programs. You can read about this here.

Happy 1080p60 capturing over USB 2!

1080p60 Lossless Capture

With the release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, everybody wants to be able to capture these systems at native resolution and frame rate. This isn't going to be difficult with hardware encoders but what about lossless software capturing? Since I have a capture card capable of 1080p60 video (Micomsoft SC-512N1-L/DVI) I decided to give it a try.

I don't by any means have an amazing computer. It's a Sandybridge based i5 2500k at stock speed with 8GB RAM. I use an SSD for my Windows 7 boot drive and save all recordings to a single Western Digital 1TB Black hard drive.

I don't have a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One so I decided to use my Xbox 360 which is capable of up scaling games to 1080p. The only 60 fps game I have is Super Street Fighter IV but this should be more than adequate for testing the capabilities.

Unfortunately the Micomsoft card is currently limited to the YUY2 (4:2:2) color space. I will test some of the most popular lossless codecs and configure them for YUY2 compression. The lossless codecs being tested are Lagarith, Huffyuv, x264vfw and UT Video. I have configured the codecs as shown below.

Huffyuv YUY2 Configuration. Predict median (best) gave the best compression.

Lagarith YUY2 Configuration

UT Video YUY2 Configuration (automatically chosen by the codec)

x264vfw YUY2 Configuration (click to enlarge)

The software used will be AmaRecTV as it allows me to see if the capture has inserted or dropped any frames along with the bit rate of the capture and CPU load.

Before the real testing begins, I decided to carry out two capture tests to get some good indications if this was possible. One was a 10 second recording of the static Xbox 360 dashboard. The other was the opening intro movie to Super Street Fighter IV which lasts over 3 minutes (it's only 30 fps). Obviously any codec can deal with a static scene but it gets really tested when it has to deal with such a fast paced intro where there are lots of fast scene changes and movement. The SSF4 intro movie that I used can be viewed here. I decided to take note of the highest bit rate and CPU load that I saw in AmaRecTV. Below are my test results. I included the MB/s values as it may be easier for some to read in relation to a hard drive writing speed.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

x264vfw really shocked me in the static dashboard test. That is just a phenomenal result.

Lagarith just cannot contend with fast motion scenes. Not only did I get inserted frames but my preview window actually started to lag and even paused for some seconds. Huffyuv, x264vfw and UT Video all passed but of course, x264vfw shows another impressive result in halving the bit rate of the other two codecs. To reduce the bit rate of x264vfw further, the preset could be changed from Ultrafast to something lower. I actually tried this but my CPU could not keep up and I was getting lots of inserted frames. You will need a very fast CPU if you want to use anything more than the Ultrafast preset.

I actually stumbled upon an issue that I can only blame the Xbox 360 for. All of the codecs that passed showed exactly 8 dropped frames over the entire intro movie.

Click to enlarge

These dropped frames seem to occur at the same time regardless of codec and happen even when the bit rate and CPU load is relatively low. The capture will be fine during the Ken and Ryu fight but once it changes to Ibuki and Guy it will drop 2 frames within 10 seconds. It will then continue to do this throughout the rest of the intro. This might be because 59.94 was chosen in AmaRecTV but this should be correct for 1080p as everyone knows that the Xbox 360 and PS3 output 59.94 at 720p. 

I can only assume the Xbox 360 fluctuates to nearer 60 fps in 1080p mode which causes the dropped frames. To see if I was correct, I manually inputted 60.00 into the Device tab of AmaRecTV so instead of "w=1920, h=1080, fps=59.94,  fcc=YUY2, bit=16" it read "w=1920, h=1080, fps=60.00,  fcc=YUY2, bit=16". Doing this was a success and I no longer had any dropped frames.

Now that we have some base results, it is time to look at proper 1080p60 capture. Since Lagarith failed the 1080p30 test, I saw no reason to try it at 1080p60. I played arcade mode in Super Street Fighter IV and again took note of the max bit rate and CPU load I encountered.

Click to enlarge

Disappointing results for Huffyuv and UT Video but the 1080p30 test foreshadowed this. The doubling of the frame rate is just too much for these codecs. What is surprising however is that x264vfw keeps at a maximum of 16% CPU load even when the bit rate is increased by 356.8 Mb/s. That would lead you to think you could lower the preset to save some bandwidth but as indicated earlier, any deviation from the Ultrafast preset is just not possible.

As the tests have indicated, x264vfw is absolutely stunning (the only one to actually achieve proper 1080p60 capture). I have read that the Western Digital I have is capable of 123.3 MB/s but this is actually quite slow compared to other drives which can go to 130 MB/s and beyond. I actually did these tests when my hard drive only had about 200 GB free so it doesn't seem like the drive slowing down as it fills up will be an issue (especially if you get a faster hard drive).

The one thing to consider is, should you even consider doing this for normal gameplay capture? The bit rates identified here are pretty huge for normal use. Even a 2TB drive would not take long to fill up. This is cool to have and knowing it can be done but I actually recommend to stick with 720p for now or even look into applying a reasonable CRF value for 1080p60 for minimal quality loss.

There is however one issue though if you do take the 1080p60 and x264vfw route. Editing the captured file is very laggy in Sony Vegas (it was taking about 10 seconds to seek to a different part of the video). More on fixing this issue here.