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Comment by concerneddork | Hacker News Reader

Lucy, esplain please.

rockchip something-or-other that's on the KiwiPi 5B. iirc it can strip hdcp and all that jazz, too? one of the ports is labeled "HDMI RX" for input.

https://kiwipi.com/blog/rk3588-hdmi-in-test/

Man, that article has _all_ the AI smells. Here's the only interesting part:

    gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! videoconvert ! autovideosink sync=false

I guess it just has an HDMI capture chip on-board. If you have a spare USB port, these are under $20 everywhere.

> I guess it just has an HDMI capture chip on-board. If you have a spare USB port, these are under $20 everywhere.

Any decent ones? I own a few that I use for managing (semi)headless machines and they all manage maybe 2-3fps

AverMedia makes decent ones. I think Magewell makes "professional" ones that give you the best image quality (4:4:4), but I haven't personally used them so can't attest to their quality.

Then there are all kinds of USB cards from dubiously named manufacturers, most being some white label chip that everyone uses. Some can work decently, some have a terrible capture rate like you mentioned. Due to the nature of these sellers popping up and disappearing, I can't really make a recommendation.

2-3fps is weird. They should all do (lossy compressed) 1080p30 over USB 2.0.

The lowest end of HDMI captures used to use HDMI-PAL converter wired to an S-Video capture chip onboard. That was completely superseded by MacroSilicon MS21xx chips that actually capture HDMI. The ones that are now everywhere are based on those MacroSilicon chips.

Hah. A while ago I concluded that all the cheap PAL capture devices were so bad in software that my go-to setup became a PAL->HDMI converter followed by HDMI capture. It certainly crashed a lot less.

The $10-$20 ones on aliexpress should be fine in general. The $6 and below ones usually are SDTV/crap ones.

I have a bunch of the Hagibis branded ones, and they work perfectly for capturing 1080p60 from laptops and cameras.

In this case it has a video encoder and and HDMI-in on the single SOC itself: https://rockchips.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Rockchip-RK...

Opi5 plus rk3588 to be exact

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