Hauppauge 610 USB-Live 2

Submitted by b on Wed, 07/11/2018 - 10:56

My ongoing quest to find a replacement for my old capture card has led me to the Hauppauge 610 USB-Live 2. It's a mouthful, but it promises to do what I want. Kind of.

I decided that since converting the output of my old consoles from analog to HDMI was going to be stupidly expensive if I wanted to Do It Right(tm), that the easier (i.e. 'cheaper') thing to do was going to be to not do any conversion at all. I'd get a capture device that understood analog video and then just captured it that way. So I grabbed the Hauppauge 610 USB-Live 2, and set off.

The first thing I found was that the thing is small, about the size of a USB thumb drive, with a place on the end to plug in the breakout cable that accepts composite inputs (and also S-Video if you want). It seemed weird that the cable wasn't a part of the unit (which means that I'll probably lose the cable at some point down the road), but I got everything hooked up, set up OBS, and gave it a try.

The results are... not great, but they're miles ahead of the other adapters I tried. There are some issues with interlacing and such, but it's at least watchable.

The only real problem I had was that when I tried to change the settings for this thing in OBS it would frequently crash. Or OBS would just crash anyway. Or OBS said it had crashed, but it was still recording. I suspect that this is because the drivers are not quite mature under Linux, or it could be OBS, or it could be solar flares, or my neighbor's EMP generator, or something else.

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