elgato game capture hd hardware encoder

So, today I wanna talk about messing around with the Elgato Game Capture HD and its hardware encoder. Let me tell you, it’s been a bit of a journey.

First off, I got this Elgato Game Capture HD thing. I plugged it in, hoping to record some gameplay. The first thing I ran into was this HDCP thing. Apparently, it’s some kind of protection that stops you from recording certain stuff. My Elgato couldn’t handle HDMI signals with HDCP turned on, so no video for me when that was active.

Next, I started playing with the software. It’s got this “Flashback Recording” feature that’s always running in the background. That’s cool and all, but it was eating up my GPU. I dug into the settings, found the “Advanced” tab, and switched the encoder to “Software.” Then I restarted the program. Way less GPU usage after that.

Then I started looking at the recording quality. I found out that the Elgato Game Capture HD can do up to 30Mbps for 1080p video. That’s pretty decent. I know there are other models like the HD60 and HD60 S that go up to 40Mbps, and the HD60 Pro even does 60Mbps. But for my needs, 30Mbps is good enough.

Experimenting with OBS

Now, I wanted to see how this thing worked with OBS. I’d heard some folks talking about how Elgato cards can’t be used as hardware encoders, but Avermedia cards can. So, I fired up OBS and tried to use the Elgato as a source. The card was sending two streams – one compressed and one uncompressed. The uncompressed one is what OBS and the Game Capture software use. Since I’m using USB 2, the 1080p60 feed is being encoded non-stop.

I went into the program settings in OBS, not the Elgato device settings, and I saw a couple of options for encoding: “Built-In (Software)” and “NVIDIA (Hardware).” I played around with both. Setting it to software gave me better quality, but it used more CPU. Setting it to hardware (I guess that’s Intel QSV) used less CPU, but the quality wasn’t quite as good. It’s a trade-off, I guess.

Final Thoughts

So, after all this tinkering, here’s what I’ve figured out. The Elgato Game Capture HD is a solid device for capturing gameplay, especially if you’re okay with 1080p at 30Mbps. Dealing with HDCP is a pain, but it’s not Elgato’s fault. Switching to software encoding in the Game Capture software helps with GPU usage, and using it with OBS works, but you gotta decide whether you want better quality or lower CPU usage.

That’s my experience with the Elgato Game Capture HD and its hardware encoder. It’s been a bit of a learning curve, but I’m pretty happy with it overall.