It was only a few years ago that the very prospect of using a camera with a capture card
for streaming, video conferencing, or teaching was still a niche idea and products like Elgato's "Cam
Link" seemed like a big deal to the mainstream audience due to it being catered specifically
to camera capture. Every few months now we get new capture cards aiming to serve double-duty and work
with cameras as well, and this one we're reviewing today goes a little above and beyond that call.
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I'm EposVox the Stream Professor, and this is the ATEN CamLive Plus - a USB
3.0 capture card with a unique twist: it has 1/4" 20 thread jacks on both
sides, USB C power delivery passthrough, and works with Android! This is a capture card
aimed both at gameplay capture and streaming and connecting to your camera with the included
hot shoe mount and streaming that to the world, too - though not at the same time.
Specs-wise, this capture card supports up to 4K
60hz input with input and passthrough HDMI 2.0 ports, and scales the footage down to 1080p60
for the USB output. It does NOT support HDR, however, just normal SDR 4K.
720p input is supported, but it is scaled in the capture card in some
way to 1080p so it doesn't look quite right. 1080i is not supported at all.
Both MJPEG as well as the higher-quality, lower-latency uncompressed YUY2 feeds are
available when connected to a USB 3.0 or higher port on PC, MJPEG will mainly be used on Android.
And in this particular capture card, the MJPEG encoding over USB 2.0 looks
TERRIBLE! The banding in color gradients, the weird staticy mess, it just looks awful.
And this affects the mobile capture, as we'll see in a little bit. So honestly,
I'm not sure how well it even works for mobile unless your phone fully supports USB 3.0.
This is great, so many of the cheaper capture cards we've looked at on this
channel only support MJPEG and it's not great.
1440p is not supported in any way here, nor is anything above 60hz.
Unfortunately, there are no audio jacks for connecting a microphone or headset.
The expectation is that you connect a mic to your computer or to the camera
if you're running it that way.
The capture card can be powered by a battery bank and power passed through to your phone if doing
mobile streaming, however! When connecting to the PC you do not need external power.
With an OBS preview latency of 80ms in YUY2 mode,
the ATEN CamLive Plus is smack in the middle of the latency bell curve of capture cards,
not being one of the faster cards, but definitely not being one of the slower ones. This means you
won't have a terrible time syncing your audio, but does mean you won't be playing from the preview.
Quality-wise, it looks great! You've been seeing gameplay footage from it with Xbox
Series X and Playstation 5 running at 4K, and the Switch obviously at 1080p.
You get an uncompressed YUY2 feed, so it's hard for that to NOT look good.
I don't have a reliable way to test mobile quality as UVC support on Android is hit
or miss based on phone's USB and OTG implementations, versions of Android,
and so on, and there aren't really any worthwhile apps that actually use UVC much.
This is very new ground for mobile. Here's a sample of the GH5s run into Android using
the "USB Camera" app designed for composite and s-video easycaps. This doesn't really tell you
much. Leaning so hard into mobile for this seems silly, the software just isn't there.
In terms of retro capture, the CamLive+ isn't a good option. It handles 480p fine from something
like the RetroTINK 2X, and the 1080p modes from the RetroTINK 5X work just fine, but neither the
1200p nor 1440p modes work. With the OSSC and a Super Nintendo, 2x 480p mode works, 3X mode does
not, 4X mode disconnects the capture card entirely somehow, and 5X also doesn't work. Oh well.
Personally, I'd like to see this card positioned at $150
even, with sales that run lower. In an ideal world, $125-ish. It's a solid card, but it's
quite basic in overall offerings, so to be expensive it's not very competitive against other
options. That's not inherently a knock against it, but you can get 4k passthrough 1080p capture cards
for much cheaper. The EVGA XR1 was just on Amazon Prime Day sale for $89 even. And that has amazing
headset support. Check the capture card reviews playlist link in the description for more options.
Product links, as always, will be in the description below. Hit the like button if
you enjoyed, subscribe, and join us on Discord for free downloads of the
awesome tunes. I'm EposVox, be kind, rewind.