A blue connector does not USB 3.0 make | Hacker News Reader

A blue connector does not USB 3.0 make

majenko.co.uk

183 pointsgrunthos124 comments

> I can get 1920x1080 at 60fps from it.

No, you can't. It's not just MJPEG, it's internally downsampled to less than 1920 pixels of effective horizontal resolution, even though it technically spits out 1920 pixels via USB. It'll do true 1280x720 though (still with MJPEG). You're also going to get stereo audio on Linux with recent kernels only because I sent in a patch to make that work - due to a hardware bug, it advertises itself as 96kHz mono, so Windows and macOS will give you that (which is actually 48kHz stereo with both channels interleaved, but they couldn't advertise it as such because it does not correctly handle packet boundaries in a way that'd be spec-compliant for stereo audio).

Welcome to the wonderful world of Chinese HDMI capture cards. These particular little dongles are all using MacroSilicon MS2109 chips. Cheap and okay-ish for some use cases, but don't expect a high quality capture card or raw uncompressed video at this price point.

What device would you recommend for HDMI capture without breaking the bank?

I use a Blackmagic Design Ultrastudio Recorder 3G. Requires Thunderbolt 3 but it’s pretty cheap for the quality.

Blackmagic all the way, we used them extensively (still do) at the beeb. Their linux driver support is excellent too, the only maintenance I ever needed to do as a sysadmin supporting a fleet of these was occasionally update their firmwares.

I know Blackmagic is a popular brand for actual cine camera equipment, how do they compare to the more common Elgato 4K60 PCIe? Obviously thunderbolt is nice as an interface rather than the add-in card, but is there anything else it offers above and beyond that?

I use Blackmagic Design's "DeckLink Mini Recorder" which plugs into PCI-e.

A note on Blackmagic hardware in general (including the ATEM switches)- they tend to only work with signals that are fully compliant with broadcast standards. For example, I have some Cisco HD PTZ cameras with a "raw" HDMI output that sends 1080p30 or 1080p60, but there's some wacky difference in the colorspace they output such that my Atomos recorder and Blackmagic capture devices only lock sync when the video level (brightness) of the scene overall is low, such as when you put your hand over the camera. The same cameras work fine with the $25 generic USB capture devices, as well as with the Avermedia BU110 which should be a "true" uncompressed USB3 HDMI capture device (that recently was marked down to $60).

Here is one example: WEIRD Blackmagic ATEM Mini Fault https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDfzwCXK0mI

The Tagarno is Looking DODGY (ATEM Flicker Fault) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJsKYNh2H0A

Inogeni devices can be had secondhand pretty cheap. These are FPGA based, and supported by UVC driver (works on most platforms). Firmware update is via a windows app.

The device discussed in the article.

It depends on what you want to achieve. Have a better camera in Teams/Zoom? More than enough. Capture VHS too.

Definitely workable but if you want better camera in VC then you may be best going for one that supports h264 or something more modern than MJPEG over USB2. If you've already got a camera then fair enough, get a cheap dongle (or spend a few quid more and get a blackmagic decklink for 99 buck/quid/whatever - PCIe though, but could use a breakout ymmv)

I think that every DSLR/DSLM is vastly superior to the common webcams, even if you pay a little extra.

Sure, it was more about cost. If you already have a camera or don't mind spending extra to get one then it'll definitely give you better quality. Having said that a high end webcam can still produce good results so there's a tradeoff somewhere. If you're putting decent source material through a really cheap adapter then I think you'd better getting a decent webcam, personally but it you already have the camera then sure.

You might be able to get away with an elgato camlink 4k but you'd need software to actually record the input.

I happen to have that exact same adapter. It can provide FullHD, but only at 30 fps. At 720p it manages 60 fps fine.

No, really, it can't. Feed it a checkerboard input and you'll get gray on the way out. It's horizontally processed at a lower resolution internally. Might be 960x1080 at 30FPS, and it can't do it at 60FPS at all. Yes, you're going to get 1920x1080 JPEG bitstreams out the USB end, but it's not actually 1920x1080.

I suspect this happens because it doesn't actually have enough internal RAM to buffer a full 1080p frame (this chip uses on-die RAM, so probably SRAM since they wouldn't go for a fancy EDRAM process, and SRAM is expensive by capacity).

Yes, really, it can, because a checkerboard test along with other fine detail tests and frame rate tests was what I put the device through to make sure I really received what I needed. It correctly manages exactly what I stated: 1080p at 30 fps, 720p at 60 fps. It's a let-down since the specs claimed otherwise, but that's what it can do.

Then the two of you are clearly not discussing the same hardware.

That's the joy of buying at the low end. You never know what you're going to get!

I know mine has a MacroSilicon chip in it as well, but that's just part of the story.

A nice side effect is you can feed to 1920x1200 and it will do the same downscaling.

Agreed, likely an internal resolution of 1280x1080. You can check out the checkerboards on my blog post here, which also analyzes the chroma sub sampling and post sharpening.

https://www.naut.ca/blog/2020/07/09/cheap-hdmi-capture-card-...

Nice review, thank you!

Has someone done this sort of analysis" on YouTube? Anecdotal: Even though it claims it's giving me the 1080p resolution, everything still seems blurry. The only time I get actual crisp visuals is when I watch a 4k stream and "down scale" it to 1080p. I feel like they're pulling a fast one on us.

You're talking about a different thing, compression bitrate and artifact.

Take a 4k video, encode it into 320p, then encode that into 1080p. For the matter of what they are discussing, your video file will be true 1080p. For the matter of what you are discussing, that video will be horribly blurry and full of artifacts.

I have 2 devices, one has 1280x1080, the other 1920x1080. Can't really be differentiated from the outside. The one has a silver casing, the other a black one.

Seems like you're the Marcan of Asahi Linux fame! I'm a supporter of your work, thanks for making the world a more interesting place!

> due to a hardware bug, it advertises itself as 96kHz mono, so Windows and macOS will give you that

Wait, shouldn't that sound really broken? I guess it depends on how exactly they are interleaved, but shouldn't the pitch be twice as high for example?

So the dongle will be doing something like this:

    LLLL... (48kHz mono) ---
                            \
                             > LRLRLRLR... (96kHz mono)
                            /
    RRRR... (48kHz mono) ---

The other end then needs to do the reverse.

Listening to it as a raw 96kHz mono stream will sound (very likely) completely awful (depending on how different the L/R signals are) as well as pitched down 1 octave.

edit: I may be confused about the direction the pitch shift is, you may well be correct that its pitch would be doubled rather than halved.

edit 2: actually the pitch would be unaffected; think about if you took a 48kHz signal (L...) and repeated every sample (LL...), if you played that at 48kHz the pitch would half, but playing it at 96kHz would double the pitch -> no pitch change. So really the issue would be how different L and R signals are that would introduce higher harmonics.

Right, that would work if it's interleaving every sample, but I think as soon as you do chunks of eg 5ms or so, there should be the mentioned doubling of pitch and other glitches. So maybe since they got away with selling this buggy thing anyways it is indeed interleaving every sample as you suggested.

No. Think of it as an offset. The 2nd channel begins at 48kHz.

I don't follow. We have two streams at 48khz, say 16bit. They get somehow interleaved to 96khz, so that must be 16bit as well. If they were interleaved to one at 48khz 32bit, I could see what you mean, one channel would just be very faint noise on top of the other.

See this image: https://i.imgur.com/Mg20l5s.png

Captured with such a capture card. If you play this file you would only hear the first ~20kHz if you are lucky. The 2nd channel is on top. That's my guess, but happy to be corrected. It sounds fine though.

No, it sounds perfectly fine. Mathematically, interleaving samples like this is equivalent to zero-padding every other sample to upsample, with no antialiasing filter. Then you add the other channel offset by one sample. The end result is that you have both channels summed up in the low 24kHz of spectrum, with half a 48kHz sample of offset for one channel (mostly negligible), and everything mirrored in the top 24kHz of spectrum as aliasing (which you can't hear). In other words, it will be very, very close to what a simple mono downmix would sound like.

I've tested a handful of them and they're always the same: not a single one of them are advertised in a honest way. Some have even a true USB 3.0 connector soldered, which of course the chip doesn't support.

I didn't know I had you to thank for a far better support in Linux!

See this comparison: https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/22713

It really depends on what version (or configuration?) of the device you get. Both have the same USB-IDs.

This is just "dodgy equipment may break the rules" - not the more complicated situations now common where the connector (especially USB-C) can no longer be used to indicate the capabilities of the device.

I almost bought a USB hub recently on Amazon that had blue ports but was actually USB-2. Thankfully I took the time to read the negative reviews first, followed by the fine print of the actual product description.

This is the exact sort of situation that supports the ever increasing importance of brands.

This is obviously a cheap chinese product, and therefore there are low expectations of quality in the result. The same is still true but in a less obvious way even from more reputable channels like buying a USB charger from a shop in an airport there are so many ways that the implementation can be subtly not what you want and not give you the right charging speed with ONE of your phones. You can't read reviews of every product and even if you could, they're not going exhaustively test every last technical aspect of something.

My solution to this particular issue is that I buy all of my USB chargers from Anker (direct, not via Amazon). I know I'm getting a product from a company that has thought about it and tested it thoroughly, so my chances are much better. And the same is true with other products.

Same, although I haven't yet tried to purchase direct from Anker. I think I tried once and it just sent me back to Amazon.

This is the exact sort of situation that supports the ever increasing importance of brands.

There are many brands that still profit off their good name, but by now are just selling generic Chinese designs with fancier enclosures. E.g. my wife bought a Satechi USB-C On-the-Go adapter. One of its stated features is that it supports 4k@60Hz. Except that it didn't work. We tried different 4k screen models from different manufacturers and two different MacBooks and a Windows PC. All of which work fine with a USB-C DP alt-mode cable and a Lenovo USB-C Dock [1]. We contacted their support and they recommend that we do a firmware update. They send you a completely undocumented Realtek firmware updater (Windows-only) that doesn't work.

I was surprised by all of this, because Satechi used to be a reputable brand for Mac adapters. So, I investigated the adapter a bit more and the MAC address stood out. The MAC address was registered to Part II Research, which doesn't really seem to exist anymore. However, looking at their website through archive.org showed that they were a division of the Chinese brand Power 7 Technology. After browsing their website, I found an adapter that was more or less identical to the Satechi USB-C On-the-Go. The same port layout, the same touted features, but with a different enclosure:

https://www.power7tech.com/page/305

Power 7 makes reference designs and sells them to manufactures that rebrand them. This explains why Satechi couldn't provide proper support and couldn't even provide a working firmware updater. They didn't design the device or the firmware. Needless to say, we returned the adapter.

When I was researching this, I found a nice blog post that opens up several adapters from reputed brands (Satechi, Icy Box, Anker) and finds that they are just rebranded generic designs of typically pretty miserable quality:

https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...

After several bad experiences with adapters and docks that do USB over USB-C, I try to buy Thunderbolt accessories when possible. You see some of the same crap (Realtek RTL8153), but on average the quality seems to be better.

[1] The 4k@60Hz support, the Lenovo Dock has other issues.

I'd be interested in what is inside the hood of my Belkin USB-C adapter (https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B08X5168HM/). It works flawlessly, with the only downside being that it forcibly removes 15 watts from the Power Delivery budget which is enough for my s/o's Acer Switch X notebook but not for my 2019 16-inch MBP.

EVGA made a line of capture devices that I suspect were made by either this brand or another similar OEM selling generic designs. They got nailed for advertising a lot of specs that were basically completely fake (the device could not do some of the modes at all, not just fake internal resolution but couldn't even output them) and then went through a couple rapid iterations of similar specs that were just fake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsICWRnj-60

EposVox has been doing a whole series. The whole market seems to be really shady and hit-or-miss if you don't go with a name-brand like elgato or blackmagic.

Huge number of sellers are just slapping their brand on an OEM design and the OEM doesn't seem to mind lying about what their design will do, and then the OEM is caught in the middle of angry customers and an OEM who just flagrantly doesn't care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZnM6cip2lk

Anker is a Chinese company incidentally. People often disparage "cheap Chinese" knock-offs, but the salient feature here is cheapness and dodgy branding, not the fact that they're made in China. Geopolitics aside, the Chinese are absolutely capable of building good stuff, as demonstrated by brands like Anker.

It's not that China universally produces garbage. It's that they can get away with producing garbage and even straight up knockoffs. Additionally they already have the equipment there to manufacture this stuff. That leads to most of those terrible items coming from Chinese companies. That's why Chinese, cheap garbage, and false marketing are associated with China. If they don't want that to be the case, someone would need to crack down on the lies and knockoffs.

A lot of good quality stuff comes from China as well, including many luxury brands. Why do they only get the reputation for the bad stuff?

China has no well known flagship brand demonstrating that level of quality.

Japan had Sony.

South Korea has LG.

What equivalent brand comes from China that US consumers know?

Aren't we literally in a thread that's discussing Anker and the quality of their products??

DJI.

Head and shoulders above the competition.

Although China also has most of the crappy knock-off drone brands that don't get the fundamentals right.

As commenter further up said: " If they don't want that to be the case, someone would need to crack down on the lies and knockoffs."

Even though China can and has done good manufacturing and engineering, I think of crappy knockoffs when I think of Chinese engineering.

Not so much for the Germans or the Swiss.

Given how much power the CCP has, they could rectify this in no time. Much like a corporation, they seem to be focused on short term gains (lots of tiny profits coming from knockoffs and frankly dangerous products which don't comply with laws of buyer's country) rather than medium/long term reputation.

To add to that, the forced data sharing and backdoors CCP forces companies to install just means they're eroding international trust in Chinese companies at the expense of long term reputation.

I feel bad for any actual Chinese engineering companies because they will have that reputation no matter what as long as they are China HQ'd.

You're right. Chinese products do have questionable reputation.

> Not so much for the Germans or the Swiss.

Since the Germans are known for cars, let's talk cars.

I drive a W212 Mercedes-Benz E250 CDI which I bought new a few years ago. My impression of German products is forever tainted.

It's lovely to drive when everything works, but everything doesn't always work.

It's designed in a complicated way that things are prone to failure, and when it does fail you'll have to take apart the whole car to fix it thereby increasing the labour cost to work on it.

It's been a money pit.

The ride and handling is pretty good though if ignore the weird suspension noises.

-----------

Now, I don't own VWs myself, but you should look into transmission problems with their DSG dual-clutch transmission. Just Google "DSG mechatronic failure".

It's a lovely gearbox, but it's guaranteed to fail at some point. And VW knows it. Yet they still continue to fit it in VW and Skoda cars (amongst others). The rest of the car is relatively fine though. Skoda especially makes superb products (pun intended) — too bad they don't sell in USA.

-----------

I hope you still remember the whole dieselgate scam of European car manufacturers.

-----------

You might want to rethink your perception of German engineering.

(Note that this is not a reflection of German people or anything. The few Germans that I personally know, and the many more that I've interacted with indirectly are wonderful people.)

All large corporations are corrupt and should be considered amoral at best. This applies to VW and any other multinational megacorporation.

If they can milk you dry and get away with it, they will do so.

I'm pretty sure that the good sentiment for German engineering is rooted in smaller and more specialized goods, i.e high quality gardening tools at this point. The time when carmakers considered anything but short term profits is long gone

All engineering has tradeoffs. There is still nothing I have driven that compares well to a high end German BMW in regards to how it feels on the road. Smooth, quiet, but powerful and stuck to the road. The 3 and 5 series are different cars. The 750+ series is where it's at. And like the Mercedes, things break often and are ridiculously expensive to fix. They have obviously prioritized other things. But if you want that premium, BMW feel that makes driving anything else feel and sound like a fun can on wheels, that high end German engineering with all it's flaws is about your only option.

BMWs tend to be more reliable than Mercedes, based on acquaintances who drive BMWs.

> But if you want that premium, BMW feel that makes driving anything else feel and sound like a fun can on wheels

You forget Porsche ;)

Anyway, before the end of this century computers will probably be doing the driving, and high-end handling likely won't be a priority for anybody anymore.

I digress.

DJI is pretty much the most respected brand for camera drones.

Lenovo. Aside from Apple, they're one of the core "premium" computer brands and are also one of the big ones for business fleets.

TCL seems to be the new Vizio in TVs.

Anker is probably the most trusted company for third party chargers, cords and other phone accessories.

Polestar is a growing name in luxury cars.

I don't know what the sentiment about Haier appliances is (they also bought GE's appliance division), but they definitely have a presence in stores in the US.

Lenovo is a big one but they acquired IBM and Motorola so not looks like Chinese homegrown.

Huawei except in the US, but it's gone. Maybe Honor will be.

> China has no well known flagship brand demonstrating that level of quality.

OnePlus.

Ha. OnePlus had a hit with the OnePlus One due to being high spec and low cost but they've slid since then. Costs are now up to the level of other flagships but they still operate like they're selling a cheap phone. My previous phone was a OnePlus and despite me running into a nasty issue, they didn't respond to my support requests.

They're also effectively out of reach of western regulatory reprisal.

If a Chinese company ships a batch of garbage electronics to western markets that lead to a string of house fires there's basically no chance that anyone will be held accountable for it; whereas, if a western company did the same they'd be far easier to hold accountable.

So Chinese producers can, and do, assemble and ship dangerously unsafe electronics in order to cut costs.

There's cases of US/Western companies getting screwed even worse. A Chinese person sees it as fair to save money any way they can, so it's relatively common to have your design modified on the fly FCC or other regulatory approval be damned. In some cases the resulting product doesn't work, but you've already paid, and there's no way to get your money back.

Anker isn’t cheap though. If you’re looking for the cheapest accessory on Amazon it’s rarely going to be Anker.

The problem is people buying the absolute cheapest item, which is most likely going to be from China. If anything it’s a testament to their industrial prowess that they can crank out “good enough” equipment this cheaply.

But seriously if you actually care enough about quality to dump the USB data, maybe don’t buy the cheapest thing on Amazon. Or buy it with the assumption you’ll need to run diagnostics on it first and hope it doesn’t short out anything or catch fire.

Anker's business model is exactly identifying these quality manufacturers and doing the QC.

It's a fantastic, valuable service, and they do it really well.

Have you had any knockoffs of Anker when purchasing via Amazon?

I ask as I do a bunch of my shopping on Amazon (trying to cut down because of the fakes/inventory commingling) and recently bought some Anker stuff - as far as I can tell it looks legit.

I usually make sure the product is sold by Amazon, or some trusted brand (here, sold by AnkerDirect and shipped by Amazon). Have you had bad experiences and hence recommend always ordering direct from manufacturer?

I think I've been relatively lucky - I've had one cheap product that wasn't quite what it should have been, but nothing from Anker. My policy is to avoid ordering from Amazon if at all possible. This is both because of the risk of counterfeits, but also for the 'vote with your wallet' approach that I don't agree with a lot of what they do.

The value of Apple products when it comes to dongles and cables is pretty clear to me. While most people laugh at that $100 usb C hub thing, I haven’t been able to find a single alternative that is as good and significantly cheaper. Most products with the same ports cost almost as much and were constant sources of issues when we used them at work while the Apple one just always works in every case.

I got one of the basic usb 3.0 A to C cables on eBay and while it generally works, I was only able to get 300mbps over it while the apple one did the full gbit I was testing.

These specs are never written anywhere. You only know when you test it out. And I find the Apple one just passes all tests while 3rd party brands are a roll of the dice.

The specs are often buried in the description on places like Amazon where you get this junk. I don't think the Apple ones are trouble free either. They don't even list what wattage the USB C power port on their dongles takes on the store page [0]. Just a completely separate support page for some reason [1].

[0] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJ1L2AM/A/usb-c-vga-multi...

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207807

My guess is as part of the Apple "Just works" philosophy, they just make sure the wattage is high enough to power everything they list on the compatible section and then they can exclude the spec since the user need not ever worry about it.

They don't actually. The 15"/16" MBP are listed as compatible but need 87/97W at full tilt but the most the VGA adapter will do is 60W. They do have that on the separate support page but not on the store page.

Happens all the time with keyboards, which are overwhelmingly running at USB1 low speed (1.5Mbit) despite many of them advertising USB2 or even USB3 sometimes. I even found one that was actually USB3 for the built in hub and lighting device, but the actual keyboard was still low speed.

And IIRC it turns out to be legit as the newer specs all say something to the effect that they are fully backwards compatible with the previous version of the spec, as well as any new requirements.

So, yes USB 3.1 "high speed" (aka 480 Mbit) is legal spec wise.

PS: If anyone knows of an actual keyboard that runs at high speed or better, i'm still interested since I have a couple devices that might be nice if they hard keyboards but don't support USB1 low/full speed.

I'm sorry but serious question, why would you need a high-speed for a keyboard? A usb packet for a keystroke is roughly 180 bits (I'm estimating from glancing at https://youtu.be/wdgULBpRoXk?t=1390). So 1.5 Mbit/s low speed could roughtly handle over 8,000 keystrokes per second. Do you really need more keystrokes or finer resolution than that?

"I have a couple devices that might be nice if they had keyboards but don't support USB1 low/full speed. "

Its not about the keyboard, its about the host not supporting USB1 speeds or TTs.

There may be enthusiast mechanical keyboards that use faster ports. My keyboard uses an Elite-C MCU in each half. I've heard some more modern stuff is switching to ARM for the MCUs.

Here's a keyboard that uses an ARM MCU:

https://github.com/tzarc/djinn

Same story goes for HDMI 2.1 https://tftcentral.co.uk/articles/when-hdmi-2-1-isnt-hdmi-2-...

"I bought some dongles on eBay after zero research, and they don't have specs I dreamed up". lol

Even if you bought USB 3.0 ones, to get raw YUV or RGB data, you specifically have to buy ones that support that. (and your desired frame rate, because you can easily buy dongles that only support 60FPS and not 50FPS your camera may output)

Don't buy from Chinese vendors that don't provide detailed specs.

Good advice.

Also, some Chinese sellers will flat-out lie in the specs, so when you're a cheapskate like me, buy from a marketplace that offers hassle-free refunds.

eBay is better at this than AliExpress, for instance. Avoid Wish like the plague. (Amazon is not locally available in my area, so I have no opionion about them.)

"Also, some Chinese sellers will flat-out lie in the specs, so when you're a cheapskate like me, buy from a marketplace that offers hassle-free refunds."

This is the takeaway. Some lie about it knowingly, and some just don't know any better as they are just reselling devices they bought in bulk from the manufacturer who lied about the specs.

This mode of operation is systematic with cheap Chinese products and the sales of such, because every time one of those few alert customers bother themselves with raising the issue, the seller instantly negotiates a discount - now they still made a buck and you still accepted to pay for a faulty product, because it's less hassle than returning it, and shipping it back often costs more than the device itself.

Whenever I pick up some cheap Chinese trinket I understand it will be a gamble.

I try to buy from the manufacturer operated merchant accounts on Aliexpress, when buying anything more expensive or specialized. Sometimes it's not the cheapest option, but I tend to trust them more.

> Don't buy from Chinese vendors that don't provide detailed specs.

Better yet: You can get a free HDMI-to-USB2 converter, by just ordering a cheap ebay HDMI-to-USB3 converter then requesting a refund when what turns up is inevitably USB2.

That works great until the seller wants you to ship it back and PayPal finds this acceptable.

It's listed on Amazon with the same specs.

The article doesn't provide any links. Anyway, reseller provided specs are not that great source either. I meant vendor as in manufacturer. (I'm not a native speaker and for some reason I have some assication between vendor = manufacturer, probably due to my programming background. I'll have to work on that. :D)

What's going on with the subject object verb agreement in the title? I see this format sometimes and it confuses me. Is the purpose of this format to convey something?

Sound like literal translation from German

Not in this case, the literal translation from German would be "A Blue Connector makes no USB 3.0", which makes perfect sense in English. But by shifting to the conditional you get "A Blue Connector would no USB 3.0 make", which is close.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52596/proper-usa...

Lots of discussion around the phrase origin there.

Possible "original":

> the archetypal phrase is "One swallow does not summer make".

It’s older English, like Shakespeare which has stuck around for emphasis. It emphasizes “blue connector” in this case.

That format is called "hyperbaton". As with most weird things in English, blame poetry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbaton

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25508/is-employi...

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27420/why-is-xxx...

As is so often the case on HN, the real value is in the comments. Thanks for teaching me a new thing today. Anastrophe is going to be my word o' the day, I think.

And here in the "Forest of Rhetoric" [0], anastrophe is just one of the 433 rhetorical figures currently cataloged, many of them with fun Greek names. You've got well over a year of word o' the day material. Epistrophe is another good one.

[0] http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

By Yoda was, this title clearly written

The agreement is normal, and occurs between "does" and "connector". The weird thing is the word order.

A typical order would be "A blue connector does not make USB 3.0"

I know it from "Stone walls do not a prison make": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Althea,_from_Prison

I find when colloquialisms like this are used it's to make a point, like using a child's nursery rhyme to indicate "something so obvious a child would know it". I think in this case it's meant to imply "This is such an obvious statement that it would be known even in antiquity, but..." to allay a "duh, no kidding" response and make the headline more eye-catching.

And even if it was a 3.0 connector, a cheap manufacturer could have just not connected the extra pins on the port.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220404132312/https://majenko.c...

Author skipped a bit, didn't indicate which part of the lsusb output made it obvious it's USB 2.0.

My knowledge is limited, I think it might be the 480M indicating the speed.

For USB 3.0 you'd see a higher number... 5000? I'm glancing at this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0

I notice this forum post: https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl/issues/12

That or 10000M, or if you don’t use the -t option you will see this:

    Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
    Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub

Yes.

The easiest to see the speeds is with "lsusb -t", which will list all ports and connected devices, with their speeds and the kernel drivers that are used by them.

For USB 2.0 high speed you will see "480M", for standard speed you will see "12M" and for low speed (e.g. keyboards and mice) you will see "1.5M".

For USB 3, you will see "5000M" (USB 3.2 Gen 1x1) or "10000M" (USB 3.2 Gen 1x2 on Type C connector).

Besides checking the speed, for some devices it is useful to check the kernel driver that is used, to verify if their full performance is reached.

For example, in the case of an external SSD or USB memory stick which claims to support UAS (USB-attached SCSI), "lsusb -t" should display "Driver=uas". If it displays "Driver=storage", that means that due to some quirk the device capabilities have not been recognized and the kernel uses the much slower Bulk-Only transport protocol, instead of UAS.

> For USB 3.0 you'd see a higher number

Not necessarily. For alt mode applications you'll be stuck with the 480MB/s data pins because the USB3 lines are repurposed.

Is it permitted by the spec to use a blue connector for USB 2?

(Not that it matters, since there's no USB logo on the device, at least on the side we see photographed).

Specs mean nothing to Chinese developers of one-off products.

It's not just China or one-off products. Nintendo couldn't figure out the USB Type C spec for the Switch. I guess the ultimate spec is the "does it work on my machine" test, and the Chinese HDMI dongles and Nintendo Switch both passed with flying colors. Ship it!

That's technically correct. Nintendo goofed up, but with China it's an established system.

I ran across this issue with a Toshiba HDMI->USB dongle for $20 bought from Walmart.

They did the scammy blue adapter, but none of the usb3 pins.

PNY makes a bunch of USB 2.0 flash drives with blue connector. I bought a couple thinking I got a decent deal and then realized my mistake when I saw the copy speeds.

Infuriating.

I wonder why anyone would ever sell more than a 16gb flash drive with usb 2.0 speeds. Unless the flash media is so internally slow that it can't transfer faster than 30mb or so there's no reason for it. No one wants to sit around and wait 25 minutes to copy a file over.

Heat. Small usb drives can barely disipate any, and fast data transmission will generate a lot.

I'd rather buy a 2.0 device that won't get hot enough to be uncomfortable.

Are you seriously interested in waiting 8 hours to transfer bulk data to your 128 gig USB 2.0 drive?

Because yes, that's what I accidentally bought.

Better to wait 8 hours than to melt my hand. But I also haven't had occassion for a 128 gig usb drive. I usually use them for ferrying small data files to other computers, scanners where usb is less tedious than getting the network drivers to work, and booting operating systems when pxe is too tedious. None of those use cases require copying more than about a gig at once.

They make nice sized usb 3.0 large storage drives for very little money that don't heat up and have fantastic transfer speeds.

I have a 256gb usb drive that cost me about $35 (on sale) that can transfer at 200-300 megabytes per second. I don't have need of it often but I wouldn't want to use a slower drive for large files.

I had the same thing happen with Gigabit ethernet adapters from some vendor on Ali Express. There was a USB 2.0 version with a black connector and a more expensive "USB 3.0" version with the blue connector. I ordered the 3.0 version, but it was capped to USB 2.0 speeds. I got a refund for the price difference between the two.

Looks like the one of these I own correctly advertised itself as USB 2.0, but I am constantly amused by the number of identical products by various white label sellers.

In my case I am using it for VHS capture, so it is excellent: The quality is well above the source material.

I did not at all believe these things would work but in fact they work a treat.

Side note: you can now get what I presume is a similar chip in a CSI camera module for the Raspberry Pi; HDMI source as 30fps camera, basically.

I bought one of these guys based on it's latency tests which showed up being pretty close to the lowest latency USB capture cards out there while having bottom of the barrel pricing. Of course, it lacks a lot of other features of the more expensive offerings but I actually found playing a game over it quite great.

Yes, I'm doing something similar. I found that the direct composite in devices were terrible, but the combination of composite-to-HDMI upscaler + HDMI capture works much better.

Now I just need to fix the fact that the VCR has stopped fast-rewinding ...

Did you also get this trick from Technology Connections channel? :P

I don't think that channel used the USB-HDMI thing.

Just don't go to "hardcore" forums, they will tell you what a shitty setup you have by not using an old ATI GPU with S-Video input running Windows XP to capture VHS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC5Zr3NC2PY introduces the "use a composite-to-HDMI upscaler and a cheap HDMI capture dongle" trick. It looks like he might've linked a different capture dongle, though the one I bought was pretty near identical to the one this article is about.

No, he captures onto a device with an USB drive.

This is a great article that illustrates the power of a picture.

I have spent a fair amount of time in the instrument control world, and USB has made me want to throw a keyboard across the room several times. It's unbelievable how something supposedly standardized is anything but. It is the most unreliable interface I have ever used.

There are also products that allow you to take USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 over fiber. You would think that such a product that claims USB 3.0 support, which is supposedly backward compatible with USB 2.0, would work with USB 2.0 devices, but usually not. I missed the fine print a few times and wasted some budget by making the mistake of thinking standards mattered.

Since I have quite the experience with USB video capture... after three or four failures, I went with a Thunderbolt case and a BlackMagic DeckLink Quad HDMI PCI Express card.

If that is too large, unfortunately the next option is the BlackMagic Web Presenter HD. It is really expensive at ~440-500€, but the BlackMagic stuff in general is worth every single cent. No troubles, no incompatibilities, no crap.

What would you recommend for capturing from multiple USB 3.0 cameras?

Capturing from multiple USB cameras? Use any standard computer with a decent USB hub and use OBS to capture the video feeds (you can use OBS virtual output to stream composited material to somewhere else then). No need for any gear sans the USB hub.

Capturing from multiple ordinary cameras? Probably something from the DeckLink series. If your gear uses SDI, go for the DeckLink Duo or the DeckLink Quad 2, for HDMI you'll either need the DeckLink Quad HDMI or the Quad 2 together with a bunch of SDI->HDMI converters. And then you can once again go for OBS.

I'm going to skip my normal "china capitalism = lie-based profit" spiel and simply suggest that if we're going to be buying Chinese c̶r̶a̶p̶ stuff (thanks a lot for supporting a Communist dictatorship, Amazon), we need a way to publicly shame online the folks that try to pull this crap either by lying about the true device specifications, lying about the expected reliability, lying about the expected compatibility etc.

I'm literally so tired of Chinese lying that it's pushing me more towards my family's Catholicism (I'm a near-atheist) just because honesty is a core value with them, and with the atheist Chinese, it's simply not, as is clear from any number of blog posts on the topic (not to mention "a percentage of any given business transactions"). https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/in-china-honesty-is-not-th...

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