Open Capture Device Vlc

[Tonja Witcraft]

Howeverwhen I use VLC -- as well as when I tried it with some security camera DVR software (iSpy, which I just downloaded to test) -- VLC defaults to 800x600 (with poor latency), and forcing it to 16:9 1920x1080 plays it at about 10 FPS with about a half second latency.

I had a similar problem with the vlc player but not the fps one.My problem was that the resolution was poor,even if I set the 'Video size' option to '1920x1080' and the 'Picture aspect-ratio n:m' to 16:9.I think they are both about 'performance'.In OBS studio it is fine,playing 1080P video like below:vlc player andOBS Studio

I found somewhat working settings for VLC, but I recommend to use OBS. VLC is able to get the stream quite smooth, but after a few minutes it starts to lag again. OBS configuration is more straightforward and it plays smooth for long periods.

The key part is MJPG chroma, as VLC set this to YUY2 by default. As is written on this forum, these devices might be just fake USB 3, and we are limited by USB 2 throughput, so we need some compression.

Probably easiest to get to your best settings is to open Capture Device, choose Video and Audio device. Click 'Show more options', the 'Edit Options' now contains device names, you can also adjust caching (0 is fine). Then after that, paste the settings adjusted before.

I recently bought an Elgato Game Capture HD60 Pro, which provides me with an HDMI input on my PC that I can hook things like game consoles up to in order to stream/record their audio and video. Elgato provides a piece of software also called "Game Capture" that allows you to perform these tasks. It has a control center to mix audio levels between the HDMI input, your microphone, and the rest of your computer audio, as well as ways to manage overlays for webcams or other capture sources, and functionality for almost every livestreaming platform to let you stream straight from their suite instead of having to use something like the more complicated (but excellent) OBS Studio, the primary choice of most Twitch streamers nowadays.

To be honest, though, part of the reason I bought the card is just to be able to play console games in a window on my computer. I'm not sure if or when I'll stream myself doing so, I just don't have a separate TV in the same room as my computer and this seemed like a fun/easy way to get around it. Elgato's software suite isn't ideal for this; it has a bunch of extra controls on the screen to perform the functions I mentioned above and I'd really rather just have a simple resizable window with the game video in it.

Doing a bit of reading, I discovered that in Windows the Elgato cards make their input available as DirectShow sources (one for video and one for audio). Thinking back to how I could make use of that, it occurred to me that VLC actually allows you to read those as input streams!

I had to cobble together a few different tutorials to get what I wanted, which is the ability to have an icon on my desktop that I can double-click and have it stream the game console video and audio in a resizable window with no other chrome and minimal lag. I did manage to accomplish it, though, so here are the steps it required. All of this assumes that you are on Windows 10, have an Elgato HD60 series capture card, have verified that you can see/hear the input via the Game Capture software or something like OBS, and that you have VLC installed. You can probably use this information to adapt for other OSes, capture cards, etc, but I can't help you with any more than what I've written below.

We need to add a LOT of command line parameters to VLC, and they're going to go far beyond the character limit in a Windows shortcut creation dialog, so we need to make an actual script that runs this command. Open a text editor (Notepad is fine). Start by putting the path to VLC into it (this might be different for you!), along with the parameter that will hide the play/pause/skip controls:

Save the file somewhere (I have a "bin" folder in my home directory for miscellaneous files like this) and verify that when you open it, it opens VLC. There'll be a terminal window showing the command, but don't worry about that; we'll deal with it later.

Here's the fun part! The default parameters in VLC for viewing a DirectShow device assume basically nothing, and we need very specific values for a number of them. I'm going to first show you the full contents of my "elgato in vlc.cmd" file and then I'll break down each of the non-default parameters and tell you which of them might need to be changed for your setup.

So we've got everything working, but you've got that ugly terminal window that opens alongside VLC, and closing it kills VLC. That's not what I want! I think there are a few different ways to fix this, but the one I found involves a little bit... of VBScript. Aww yeah.

Go in Windows Explorer to where you saved your invisible.vbs and right-click on the file. Choose Send To -> Desktop (create shortcut), then right-click on that shortcut and choose Properties. In the tab named "Shortcut", in the box labeled "Target", after the existing path to the VBScript file, add the path to your .cmd file. In my case the full target box looks like this:

That's it! You should now have the ability to invoke your desktop shortcut and see the input. One thing I've noticed is that the connection VLC makes occasionally has a barely noticeable lag to it-- I don't know enough about this stuff to understand why it only happens sometimes, but usually closing VLC and trying again fixes it.

With the cabling correctly plugged, VLC (available from the Software Centre) can be used to capture sound and image. You must access the menu Media > Open Capture Device and set the EasyCap device (e.g. /dev/video0) for recording (it can also be set for streaming). The Video For Linux 2 library is usually recommended for the job.

The VLC makers say that recording like this takes the raw stream from the recorded device 'as-is' and that there is nothing to do about it. Not completely true. Take the EasyCap stick e.g., I used it with software from Arcsoft in Windows - I'm sorry - which gave me the choice to record directly to mpeg1 or mpeg2 (also from PAL). The resulting files could be easily cut up and transcoded afterwards. Considering the large transcoding times one would even stick to the original mpeg(2)-format. Anything not to get these ENORMOUS raw avi's which are only viewable with VLC itself.

Recently I've been looking into digitising a bunch of old family videos. They're recorded on old media formats like VHS, MiniDV, MiniDisk, CD and DVD. I'm not too concerned with quality, it's more about making them easily accessible and not be burdened by degrading physical media and playback devices.

The most obvious solution is to buy a USB video and audio capture device. They're very common and cheap, usually selling for around US$3.50. Sure they only take composite video or S-Video rather than RGB or component, but that's good enough.

One of the many things I dislike about Windows is that it installs random proprietary junk whenever I plug in a USB device. And if it doesn't, I'll need to install that junk manually. Going by user reviews, as usual the drivers seem to be buggy, incompatible and full of security issues. So instead, I'm going to use a Linux test machine. By using a test machine, I can minimise any potential damage from a random cheap USB device. Linux has video4linux2 (v4l2), which is a collection of open source drivers and other software for video capture devices.

To find which devices are coming from our USB device, we can list them before and after plugging it in. For convenience, we can use the symlinks matching our USB device under /dev/v4l/by-id/ or /dev/v4l/by-path/.

It's worth noting that whenever I use these options, they seem to stick somewhere such that if I removed them, they'd still be active. So for example, I couldn't switch back from mjpg to raw video. Though sometimes, but not always, after a reboot or reconnect it would switch back. I didn't look into what's causing it. It could be VLC, v4l2 or even the USB device, though it's probably v4l2.

The actual sound device path can be found under /dev/snd. For convenience we can use the symlinks matching our USB device under /dev/snd/by-id/ or /dev/snd/by-path/. However, VLC doesn't support supplying sound devices to v4l2 due to security issues. So, we won't be using these paths. We'll use the ALSA identifier instead.

If we're using a SCART output, make sure the SCART connector going into the output device has output pins. Some SCART connectors, typically adapters, only have input pins that are expected to only be plugged into a display.

A misaligned, warped, glitchy, static output without the correct colours likely means our output is using a different video standard from what the input expects. For example, 60Hz NTSC instead of 50Hz PAL.

v4l2 has the usual options to adjust the image, such as brightness and contrast. VLC also has those options under "Tools > Effects and Filters". VLC's options are a lot more convenient as it provides a live preview. Unfortunately, VLC's GUI uses tiny sliders to adjust values, with no numbers or number inputs visible.

For the USB device I had, I couldn't figure out how to get VLC or ffmpeg to support NTSC (480i@60hz), so I always configured the output device to use PAL (576i@50Hz) instead, which works as default. Changing VLC's "video standard" option in general didn't seem to have any effect. Trying to identify available standards also errored:

I assume this is a driver limitation as screenshots of the proprietry software does show options to change video standards. This wasn't a major issue for me as being in the United Kingdom, most media and devices were targeting PAL anyway.

It came to my attention while looking at the File drop down menu that it looked very familar (for VLC) with an option to Open a [File Device...] from there it was a matter of back tracking where the menu for configuring the Video Capture Device was located. View > Options > Capture

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