EposVox
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2023
10:56 · 895K views · Jun 9, 2020
EposVox reviews a very cheap USB 2.0 HDMI capture dongle sold under names like BlueAVS/Goodan, testing whether it works as an alternative to the Elgato Cam Link. He covers its quality and limits for webcam-style and camera capture use.
Commenters cite it as evidence that a roughly $12-20 HDMI-to-USB capture device is good enough for many uses, such as digitizing video or using a camera as a webcam.
5 comments from Hacker News
At this point I would just buy a $12 HDMI to USB dongle and side step the need for any of these apps. Way better, no new software required, no OS specifics. Ex: this video
I use a similar setup with a Panasonic GH5 I already had, but I bought one of those €15 Chinese HDMI capture USB UVC cards [1]. These work surprisingly well, and I've had zero issues using them for ~4 hours back-to-back Zoom meetings on my MBP. They've also received some good reviews on YouTube [2]. For audio, I use my Airpods. Great setup for meetings. Latency is good enough IMO. -- [1]: [LINK] [2]: this video
This might be implementation dependent. MJPEG per se is not bad as you make it out to be. Example reviews: this video and many more. They all boil down to the same thing: excellent device, even with MJPEG. Obviously it's more dependent on what you use as camera, than the encoding method.
There was some great discussion on the Show HN for the similar project TinyPilot: [LINK] It uses a Can'tLink: this video
Nowadays there are cheap alternatives on eBay/Aliexpress: this video Although presumably they don't do audio...