Hey, everyone. We at HD Retrovision wanted to wish you all a Happy New Year. We hope you have a great 2015.
I also wanted to post some information regarding the Twitch.tv live stream we had set up during our Kickstarter campaign to demo the component cables in action. Because we scrambled quickly to get everything set up, it looked like a hopeless mess of wires. But now looking back, it wasn't all that complicated. I drew up the following diagram which details our setup almost entirely:
The main component that needs additional explanation is the YPbPr capture device. This particular USB capture card is a rather affordable item. It works well, but does have a few caveats. The first is that since it's not specifically designed for game streaming, it has no passthrough to allow for simultaneous connections to both the computer and the television. The distribution amplifier is there to perform this function by splitting the video and audio signals to the respective devices.
The second thing is that I had trouble getting the Open Broadcasting Software (OBS) to activate the audio input on the capture device. I found that I had to load the custom software that came with the device just to trick the audio driver into activating itself. I avoided that annoyance by connecting the audio directly into the computer's sound card.
Lastly, while the picture looked flawless on the television, we noticed there was a minor greenish tint to the colors in the captured video stream. I was able to adjust the video parameters for the capture device to get a much more accurate picture. It still wasn't 100% perfect, but it was much better. In case anyone is interested, here are the settings we used:
Brightness: 6006
Contrast: 5694
Hue: 5070
Saturation: 5694
Some of our streams had split-screens with both the component video and composite video running at the same time. We accomplished this using a special prototype which has both video connections brought out from the console. This is the same prototype we used to record the split-screen content on this website. The composite video went to a 2nd capture card (AVerMedia C027) internal to the PC. We didn't use the split-screen that much during the stream, so for the sake of simplicity I left it out of the diagram.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to find a YPbPr component video capture device that supports 240p video signals used by retro consoles. I have tested a good deal of them over the past two months, and you can see the results here. Due to its popularity, several people have contacted us regarding compatibility with the Elgato Game Capture HD, but that unit does not support 240p on its component video input. I reached out to Elgato informing them and asked if they could do anything about it. They were definitely interested in exploring a solution, and said they will keep me posted if they are able to do anything.
As always, feel free to contact us with any questions/comments/concerns via our contact page. Enjoy the new year!