The Genki Shadowcast is a very interesting product to discuss, as it showed up through
Kickstarter specifically promising low-latency PC gameplay from your Nintendo Switch and
Playstation 5 - but showed up right around the same time as other companies tried pulling
one over on us charging upwards of $80 for a rebadged "can't link" - the name we give
the super cheap cam link knockoffs flooding eBay and Amazon for under $20.
Videos on those linked below to get up to speed.
I received no end of requests to look at this last year, and it's finally here.
Everything about it is weird, though.
I'm EposVox, the stream professor, and we review every capture card we possibly can
on this channel, so naturally I wanted to get my hands on the Shadowcast and see what
the hype was for myself.
Did Genki just re-badge a can't link clone, or did they really make something low-latency
and impressive here?
Well... ehhh, let's talk about it.
What you get for your $50 purchase is a tiny little capture card, a USB C cable with a
right-angle on one end, and a USB C to type A adapter - something you can choose to not
order and save $5 through their website.
Where this device stands out from other similar clone capture cards is instead of a USB Type
A jutting out of the case, you have a full size HDMI end, with USB C female on the other
end.
I find it hilarious that Genki chooses to bundle and charge extra for a simple USB C
to A adapter - when most people are likely to have USB C to A cables at home - but NOT
include a HDMI extension cable, as this particular setup can be limiting for use cases, even
for some of the advertised use cases on their site, such as connecting to a camera - few
of which have direct full-size HDMI out ports on them.
The shell is made of plastic, nothing to write home about.
The entire design of this product seems to be specifically built around fitting into
the Nintendo Switch dock, to allow you to connect it to your laptop to use instead of
a TV.
This is just such a bizarre selling point to me, given that the Nintendo Switch literally
has a screen built-in.
But, of course, you can use this with any game console with HDMI out, as long as the
wider HDMI plug will fit.
I note this, as it was a tight fit on some of my HDMI switchers' outputs.
Missing here is any sort of HDMI passthrough.
The objective of this product is to use your computer - primarily targeting Macbooks and
iMacs here - as a TV, rather than connecting it to a TV, so you don't get that connection
at all.
Don't let the USB type C fool you, though - just like all of the cheapo sub-$100 clone
capture cards I've been reviewing over the past year, this is a USB 2.0 device through
and through.
This is both confirmed by USBTreeView, and the fact that, also like all of these other
clone devices, it only support MJPEG encoding.
This means that, unlike most modern USB 3.0 and PCIe connected capture cards, it's not
providing uncompressed video to your computer.
Instead, it's sending a signal that's already compressed with effectively JPEG compression.
This adds latency, which affects your ability to play, it requires more work for your CPU
to decode the feed, and adds compression artifacts to the video and degrades the quality before
you even compress it for streaming or video making.
It's not great.
Plus, just like the $5-$20 "can't links" I've reviewed over the past year, it doesn't ACTUALLY
support 60FPS at 1080p.
Yep, here we go again.
You can send up to 4K 60hz to this capture card from your next-gen console, but the chipset
on-board can't process a 1080p60 feed, so you can either capture at 720p60 for a blurry
mess, or 1080p30 pretending to be 1080p60 for an unstable mess.
What's fascinating is the inconsistencies in this information being presented by Genki.
On their website they say 4k60 console input is supported, but the user manual says only
4k30 is supported.
This is incredibly disappointing and really hurts its viability for playing on your computer,
on top of looking gross for streaming or content creation.
Surprisingly, I was actually able to push 1440p at 144 or 120hz to the Shadowcast with
display cloning, so it's apparently a flexible little device.
Obviously you're still limited to 1080p30 or 720p60 capture, and the MJPEG doesn't look
great, but I didn't notice any expected egregious scaling artifacts or anything, so that's pretty
neat.
I guess streaming PC games on a device designed to play consoles on your PC is a tad silly,
but you can!
This is a UVC capture card, so it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and will show up
in your video chatting apps as a webcam, too!
For play on the computer, I generally always consider OBS's preview to be a no-go with
all capture cards.
It has just enough of a processing or render delay to be too slow, even with the fastest
capture cards I've tested, and you typically want to rely on the first-party apps provided
by your capture card manufacturer or something like Amarec for trying to play from.
Even still, I have found the fastest capture cards I've tested to still not be playable
for input-sensitive games like first person shooters from these previews.
This was something I got into a debate with Linus over way back in 2018, also involving
a Nintendo Switch.
I maintain my stance at the time.
How does the Shadowcast fare for live play, then?
About as expected, which is not great.
I wanted to test both with OBS Studio for my usual capture card latency data, and with
Genki's own app (which we'll cover more in a minute).
I got anywhere from 115 to 120ms of input latency in "Perfomance mode" for 720p60, and
106 to 113ms of latency for Resolution mode for 1080p30.
In OBS Studio set to 1080p60, I got the same latency, about 106 to 120ms of latency, with
a slightly faster rate of 97 to 103ms of latency at 720p60.
So in this case, at least on Windows, OBS is actually a tiny bit faster than Genki Arcade,
so... uh LAWL?
Overall, though, this is definitely on the much higher end of latency compared to other
capture cards I have reviewed.
It's a pretty slow card, even compared to the original Can'tLink I got my hands on.
Combine that with the existing input latency of your computer or laptop monitor and you
will have a bad, bad time with any game that has a lot of sensitivity to input timings.
As expected, trying to play a first person shooter from their app or OBS was nauseating,
especially when trying 1080p and losing half of your frames, it's just not great.
I did have luck, however, playing Returnal through this.
It's a third-person shooter, and it was definitely a FAR worse experience than playing just plugged
into your monitor or TV, but I was able to play, not get nauseous and still do pretty
well, just with a significant challenge.
Less input-sensitive games, especially from the Switch like they market, were more manageable.
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[end cs/nebula ad] Genki developed and released an app for the
Shadowcast to allow lower-latency gameplay on your computer, claiming on the Kickstarter
page that their app is 50ms faster than OBS Studio.
The app lets you choose between "Perfomance mode", copyeditor needed, and "Resolution
mode" aka 720p60 and 1080p30 respectively.
On Mac, you can take screenshots and record video, on Windows you cannot.
But they also released a webapp for Chrome which specifically looks for the Shadowcast
device and lets you take screenshots and record video, as well - useful for computers that
you can't install apps on, though the Windows app doesn't actually require installing.
They're repackaging the video here.
The Shadowcast already takes in MJPEG video.
This can be directly packaged in an AVI or MOV container and saved directly to edit or
post to YouTube.
Virtualdub on Windows and guvcview on Linux can do this, but for some reason they re-encode
the video to H264 in a MP4 container on Mac and AVC in a WEBM with the Chrome tool.
Further degrading quality.
Like I said, the Shadowcast is just weird.
It's marketed REALLY WELL to appeal to appeal to newcomers to the capture card scene, and
it seems a lot of people are happy with their purchase, but... there's much better options
out there, and worst case you could have paid a fraction of this price to get the same product.
I dunno, it just bugs me.
If you want to play your console games on your computer - especially Mac computer - and
want a slightly higher guarantee that it will "work", the Genki Shadowcast is... an option.
But as a capture card, it's not a great buy, and it's sad to consider how many people might
play their next-gen, beautifully-rendering game consoles with this blurry mess.
I will give Genki credit, they did what I said during my Atomos Connect capture card
clone review was necessary: They did more than re-badge a shell, but they're still using
the same guts as many of these cheapo capture cards use, and it's not a product of quality,
as a result.
Product links will be in the description below, as always.
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I'm EposVox, we'll meet again.