Streaming from console what hardware

[233]

Sons looking to live stream his console gaming with ideally Picture in Picture of himself shouting at the tv no doubt

consoles would be Xbox one X and some PC

so need

capture device of some sort
Camera
Already have a couple of pcs and a spare trusty Mac Pro so just need a capture device and suggested software if required

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Cheapest capture is one of those usb2 hdmi capture devices which have a decent low latency and 1080p ability. Feed it the hdmi from the console via a splitter.

They are decent enough considering you will be compressing it hard for streaming.

Up from that are capture card like avermedia hd gamer 2. It has a pass through of hdmi and will capture that as it passes through.
More expensive, but it’s quality is notably better than the usb device.

I have both devices and can compare from the same hdmi source.

In terms of merging it, OBS is your friend.

 

[~cw]

If you care about chroma subsampling and overall picture quality, look for a card which can do at least 4:2:2 and ideally RGB 4:4:4. I have some of those China clone USB HDMI capture devices, they're fine if you only want MJPEG at 4:2:0 at non-60fps resolutions, but you'll need to spend a little more for 1080p60 and higher resolutions.

EposVox channel on YouTube is highly recommended, he does all the testing and reviews so you don't have to and he knows what he's talking about. He also has some good guides for setting up OBS for lowest latency, customising the graphics and so on. Really great series of videos for new streamers on what pitfalls to avoid.

Aside from capture device, you need a 7200 rpm spinny disk for dumping raw captures and probably a 1TB M.2 SSD for editing on, as saving any streams for offline editing will require a high bit rate codec (H.264 lossless, HuffYUV, Lagarith, ProRes or similar).