Last year, I reviewed the beefiest capture card that I’ve found - the Datapath VisionSC-DP2,
capable of 4K 60FPS capture via Displayport.
It was a monster with a monster price, and generally overkill for any current game streaming
needs.
Today, we have a little brother to it, designed specifically for game streaming in mind - the
VisionLC-HD2.
Datapath is typically a B2B business-oriented company, but thought game streamers might
be interested in the capabilities of this new, low-profile card.
The VisionLC-HD2, a name that’s not easy to keep saying, features 2 HDMI ports on a
small PCIe x4 card.
But instead of the typical in and out HDMI passthrough, these are both inputs.
Slot 1 can support signals up to 1080p 60FPS, whereas slot 2 can support up to 2160p UHD
“4K” up to 30 FPS!
Yeah, pretty neat.
This makes for a very flexible capture solution.
There’s a couple potential use cases here.
you could use it for a game capture input and a facecam input on the same card, which
makes for a lot less system usage and setup hassles compared to the like 4 capture card
setup I usually run.
Or you could put 2 game captures in at once for a dual stream setup or for switching consoles,
game console and PC input, and so on.
It’s super flexible.
You can use both inputs at once or one at a time.
As video devices, they’re just labeled as inputs one and two.
Annoyingly, the physical HDMI ports are not labeled, so I keep having to reference a little
paper pamphlet they included with my loaner unit.
You might want to use a labelmaker or sharpie to mark these, as only 1 port supports 4k
input.
That being the port closest to the computer motherboard.
The outermost port only supports up to 1080p 60FPS.
This is a tiny little PCIe capture card, smaller than my Elgato HD60 Pro.
It even comes with a low-profile bracket for a small form-factor streaming rig.
The card itself requires no extra power and doesn’t have a fan, BUT there is one annoyance.
To support the full bandwidth of both signal channels, this is a PCIe 4x card, meaning
you won’t be able to use one of the small PCIe 1x slots like with the Elgato and AverMedia
game capture cards I’ve reviewed.
Most normal PC motherboards only have 1x and 16x slots, so you’ll likely need to populate
one of your bigger slots with this card.
The card works perfectly in software like OBS Studio, Wirecast, and vMix in Windows,
and they have a Video4Linux driver package for it, as well.
It was super easy to set up in OBS, and I’ve done quite a few of my Twitch streams with
this card.
Here, my game console goes in one HDMI port for my main image, and my camcorder runs via
HDMI to the other port for facecam, as well.
Super easy to set up!
The first time I tried using this card, I had a huge audio delay issue within OBS, but
after a reboot I’ve yet to recreate this issue.
So just make sure you reboot!
It performs well, with full uncompressed access to your HDMI sources, and easy integration
into streaming programs.
Finding the card might be another issue; there’s a couple general video gear shops that have
it for around $600, but I can’t find it on B&H or Amazon.
I’ll have general search links for those sites just in case they become available.
$600 might be tough to swallow for a capture card, but when you consider the low-latency
uncompressed capture and the fact that it’s two capture cards in one, it’s actually
a pretty solid value.
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Would you use a dual-input capture solution like this?
Let me know in the comments below.
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