DATAPATH VisionLC-HD2 Dual-Channel LiveStream HDMI Video Capture Card

Game Streamer's Dream

This features 2 HDMI ports on a small PCIe x4 card. But instead of the typical in and out HDMI passthrough, these are both inputs. Slot 1 can support signals up to 1080p 60FPS, whereas slot 2 can support up to 2160p UHD 4K up to 30 FPS! Yeah, pretty neat. This makes for a very flexible capture solution. There's a couple potential use cases here. you could use it for a game capture input and a facecam input on the same card, which makes for a lot less system usage and setup hassles compared to the like 4 capture card setup I usually run. Or you could put 2 game captures in at once for a dual stream setup or for switching consoles, game console and PC input, and so on. It's super flexible. You can use both inputs at once or one at a time. As video devices, they're just labeled as inputs one and two. Annoyingly, the physical HDMI ports are not labeled, so I keep having to reference a little paper pamphlet they included with my loaner unit. You might want to use a labelmaker or sharpie to mark these, as only 1 port supports 4k input. That being the port closest to the computer motherboard. The outermost port only supports up to 1080p 60FPS. This is a tiny little PCIe capture card, smaller than my Elgato HD60 Pro. It even comes with a low-profile bracket for a small form-factor streaming rig. The card itself requires no extra power and doesn't have a fan, BUT there is one annoyance. To support the full bandwidth of both signal channels, this is a PCIe 4x card, meaning you won't be able to use one of the small PCIe 1x slots like with the Elgato and AverMedia game capture cards I've reviewed. Most normal PC motherboards only have 1x and 16x slots, so you'll likely need to populate one of your bigger slots with this card. The card works perfectly in software like OBS Studio, Wirecast, and vMix in Windows, and they have a Video4Linux driver package for it, as well. It was super easy to set up in OBS, and I've done quite a few of my Twitch streams with this card. Here, my game console goes in one HDMI port for my main image, and my camcorder runs via HDMI to the other port for facecam, as well. Super easy to set up! $600 might be tough to swallow for a capture card, but when you consider the low-latency uncompressed capture and the fact that it's two capture cards in one, it's actually a pretty solid value.