Elgato Game Capture HD60 Pro

Be aware of what you are getting here. Game Capture HD60 Pro review. I read all this info on the product page and thought it would do things that it does not. Perhaps that's my own fault, or perhaps the wording is misleading or unclear. It's probably some of both. I'll go over things I thought it would do and general usage issues below. First off, I had hoped this thing would work as a way to offload CPU and GPU usage away from streaming software, which it... doesn't really do far as I can tell? Ideally I was hoping I could stream PC games using OBS Studio and have this card encoding both the stream and a high quality local copy at the same time (or even just the local copy), which the description seems like it says it could probably do. Turns out these encoding chips only work within it's own software, so that's out immediately. If you were hoping to buy a card to cover all your encoding for you and get a nice looking stream and a perfect local copy, this ain't gonna do that. In fact even using it's own software, the master copy encode seems...very encode-y. There's artifacts and stuff. Definitely not what I was hoping this device would accomplish. In general I wouldn't suggest this hardware for "same PC" gaming and streaming. It seems more geared toward capturing console stuff. You can't select the device as an encoder choice in OBS, at all. Oh and if you are thinking of trying to just run both programs, if it's being used in OBS the other software will just say "device is being used" or something and do nothing. The pass-through seemed to have issues too. Immediately I noticed the color settings were totally different, which is annoying for something that was supposed to just be a pass-through. If that's different, who knows what else is? I didn't bother using it very long to find out. You can fiddle with the settings to adjust this, but again, it's a pass-through. I guess it's intended usage is more for sending the pass-through signal out to a TV? I also tried using my GPU's HDMI into this device and display port for my monitor, and cloning the displays. This seemed to work OK, although I also didn't bother testing this extensively and just went back to GPU to monitor directly. Either way you do this, you're still ending up with capturing the entire monitor in OBS or the included software, which is less than ideal for PC gaming for various reasons. Again, for console capture, it seems OK, but don't bother for same PC stuff. Maybe if you are capturing another PC's output it would be more useful? If you are capturing a console via HDMI, you can indeed use this device as a video capture input in OBS, which is good. If it didn't do this, I'm not sure what it would be good for! I played some Xbox 360 on it for awhile and it seemed alright. Even just looking at the OBS preview screen was playable for awhile, so that's nice but nothing to count on. The annoying part here is how audio is handled, which after screwing around with it for several hours now, I couldn't even really explain it. There is a separate Audio Capture software that it comes with that lets you mess with settings but it's pretty unclear and feels like it's missing a lot of my devices. It also totally screws around with default audio devices, sets stuff you didn't ever tell it to as default, etc. If you use the program Audio Switch for quick and simple changing of playback devices, it totally crashes it. I can't even open the program anymore. Looking at the 360 HDMI capture in OBS, the device gets a volume bar of it's own but never seems to come in through it no matter what setting you use. That includes manually adding the audio signal as a separate source. If you mess with settings enough, you can eventually get the game audio coming in through the Desktop Audio channel, which is less than ideal, but the only thing I could seem to get to work. Anytime you change any of these settings there's a decent chance your default audio device has been changed too so have fun manually setting back to your headphones every time, especially now that Audio Switch has been rendered useless! Edit: OK, Audio Switch only crashes if the Audio Capture software is open. It has a taskbar icon so it might be hidden. Closing it makes Audio Switch work again. Still sucks, but at least it's not system wide. So I haven't had a great day with this hardware. Granted, it's only been a day. Maybe I'll figure some of this stuff out eventually. Since it's effectively useless for the PC gaming stuff I wanted it to do, the 60 FPS is probably unimportant and I would have likely been better off getting the Elgato Game Capture HD with the more versatile video input options. It seems like all the Elgato products are missing one big feature and none of them have them all. If the HD could do 60 fps or the HD60 Pro could do non-HDMI signals they'd probably be the clear choice. The HD60S doesn't have master copy, but having played with it on this device, it wasn't really all I had hoped anyway, so who knows. I feel like I probably overpaid for a device that does less than what I had hoped and been led to believe it could do by it's description. Again, I'm not sure if this is my failing to read or their failing to be clear. I'd be a lot less annoyed at this product if it had the "retro" inputs available to it. Elgato if you want to make this thing awesome, try and make it do some of the stuff I'm talking about here. Perhaps there are hardware limitations in play that I'm not aware of, but I don't see how it can do encoding inside one program but not another. And I don't see why the master copy looks so bad when everything's cranked up to max quality. I think I'll try and see if there's an option to install only the drivers and not the software, see if that helps my usability problems any. I know this review sounds incredibly negative, but it's mostly just the information I wish I had available to me before buying it. I'm sure this thing works better for console captures, I just thought it would do more for same PC situations than it does. Side note, the requirements claim you need a 2nd gen i7 processor for Stream Commander to work but (I think? I didn't mess with it a lot but I pressed buttons and stuff happened) it worked fine for me on a i5 4590. This is something I wondered before buying and didn't see an answer to so here you go. Stream commander sounds like it's a different piece of software in the description but it's just part of the existing video capture software, far as I can tell. Side side note, open the box using a knife or something. I used my thumbnail and now I have a pretty painful cardboard cut under it!