Magewell Chinese copy - strip down with pictures

[david151]

I purchased one of these Chinese devices from Ebay:


http://www.ebay.com/itm/XI100D-1080P-60FPS-UVC-USB-3-0-HDMI-Capture-Dongle-USB2-0-HDMI...QAAOSwYIxX~M5g

On paper looks identical to the Magewell XI100DUSB, but is much cheaper.

From testing so far, I am impressed with the device and was well worth the gamble. It does indeed capture HD at 60 fps.

I have also taken the device apart and photographed the board and provided some close ups of some of the chips (see attached images). I did not remove the heat sink, as it seems to be bonded with some sort of ridged thermal paste.

I would be interested to compare these pictures to a branded Magewell device. Has anyone stripped a branded Magewell down?

[JVRaines]

The chip with the heatsink undoubtedly does the heavy lifting, so you will have to disassemble it for any meaningful comparison.

[david151]

Yes I know, but there is some weird solid thermal paste like stuff on the headsink binding it to the chip. I would have to cut it with a knife and did not want to risk damaging anything. It's not like the type of paste between a computer CPU and fan.

[ezcapper]

The HDMI receiver looks like it is hdcp compliant. Have you tried any hdcp input sources with this device? thanks!

edit: Here is a better pdf. It looks like the bswz is the hdcp 1.4 compliant one, and the bswz-p is non hdcp compliant. Yours appears to be the first one, but not sure:
http://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data-sheets/ADV7611.pdf

[tarzan54]

Do you know if this captures video from a dish network receiver to computer?

[david151]

The HDMI receiver looks like it is hdcp compliant. Have you tried any hdcp input sources with this device? thanks!

edit: Here is a better pdf. It looks like the bswz is the hdcp 1.4 compliant one, and the bswz-p is non hdcp compliant. Yours appears to be the first one, but not sure:
http://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data-sheets/ADV7611.pdf

Thanks for your info, I think you may be right about that. I am currently away at the moment, but will test it ASAP.

On another note, I am tempted to take the heatsink off and find out what the big chip is. Do you know what sort of thermal paste is likely to be on there and how to get it off? I will also need to buy some more to reapply - so need to know what it is. As I explained it's hard, not like the stuff on a computer CPU.

[redwudz]

It's likely a thermal adhesive. I wouldn't try to remove it. With some types that are a bit soft to the touch you may be able to heat the heat sink with a thermal gun (Not a hair dryer) and twist the sink off with a pair of pliers. Some hard adhesive types can be cooled in a freezer and snapped off with a screwdriver before it warms. The hard epoxy types may be near impossible to remove without damage to the HS and chip.

Acetone or maybe goo gone or fingernail polish remover may be used for removing the residue of some types of compound. Some of the soft types may be removed with 99% isopropyl alcohol.

But I wouldn't risk either method on a working chip.

Some types: http://www.aavid.com/product-group/interface/adhesive

[david151]

I wonder if this type of Thermal Adhesive would be suitable:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Arctic-Silver-Thermal-Adhesive-Glue-Epoxy-7g-2x-3-5g-Tubes-A...0AAOSwQItTzPCJ


I think if it is thermal Adhesive / Epoxy it would be very difficult to remove. Like redwudz said, I don't think I will risk it with a working chip. Also any chemical that removes Epoxy is also likely to make the identification on the chip unreadable.

[vhelp]

About a month ago, when the hype was all around the Magewell, I had a hunch that I would find a copy of it but branded a different name and much cheaper price on ebay. It turned out to be true. And the cheapest price I could find was about $59 dollars. I was ready to purchase it but because I did not understand HDMI and conversions to component svideo, (so I could test it myself) I gave it up. Anyway. From my perspective and opinion, the magewell is an over-priced unit. My guess is correct, with the way I look at things that hit the market a new. Someone wins the bid to buy it first, so they price it (mark it up high) and sell it. Then, a year later, when the contract is up, (so that other vendors can buy it) the device becomes the usual free-for-all and anyone can build a new case around it and stamp their own logo or not and just sell it for what its really worth.., say $50 to $100 bucks. I saw another one around $79 last week and almost bought it, but decided not to. I had other things on my mind. Anyway. There are two other spin-off's from this but I forget the exact differences between the two versus the Magewell.

[redwudz]

I've ordered several electronic devices through Ebay directly from China without problems.
But when you do you might consider a outside protection plan similar to SquareTrade.

Probably less than $20US for a device like a Magewell knockoff for 3 years protection.
A bit easier than trying to get a refund a year or two later from a foreign supplier if it fails.
Just something to keep in mind.

[Flyingkiwi]

I took the back off a genuine Magewell unit. The board is completely different.
I was unable (did not dare to) to pull the board from the case as it was firmly stuck.
Just looking at the back of the board indicates Magewell is much more populated and a completely different hardware design.


/Mike

[Cornucopia]

"You gets what you pays for"

Scott

[ezcapper]

Hey does your magewell copy work with Magewell's quick sync capture program "Capture Express"?

http://www.magewell.com/capture-express

[dellsam34]

About a month ago, when the hype was all around the Magewell, I had a hunch that I would find a copy of it but branded a different name and much cheaper price on ebay. It turned out to be true. And the cheapest price I could find was about $59 dollars. I was ready to purchase it but because I did not understand HDMI and conversions to component svideo, (so I could test it myself) I gave it up. Anyway. From my perspective and opinion, the magewell is an over-priced unit. My guess is correct, with the way I look at things that hit the market a new. Someone wins the bid to buy it first, so they price it (mark it up high) and sell it. Then, a year later, when the contract is up, (so that other vendors can buy it) the device becomes the usual free-for-all and anyone can build a new case around it and stamp their own logo or not and just sell it for what its really worth.., say $50 to $100 bucks. I saw another one around $79 last week and almost bought it, but decided not to. I had other things on my mind. Anyway. There are two other spin-off's from this but I forget the exact differences between the two versus the Magewell.

Although it is true that some brands are overpriced, it is still a fact that cheap crap is cheap crap and good stuff are built to work as it should, Let me make it clear about how HDMI transmission works because most people think HDMI is digital so it doesn't matter what capture card to use, It actually does matter.

HDMI stream is non compressed data packets at a rate of 17.82 gigabits per second (HDMI version 1.4 has a bandwidth limit of 10.2 Gbps) the data being sent to USB is compressed and encoded by that chip that has heat sink to a proprietary format usually MPEG4, So a good chip makes a good compression, a crappy Chinese chip makes a picture full of artifacts, So it's your choice, You get what you pay for.

[dellsam34]

That's why it is always good to avoid capturing video whenever possible, Video from the source is always compressed and encoded to a video format (Sources such as DVD/Blu-ray/UHD/Satellite/ATSC/QAM/IP Stream..etc) So getting that format if possible to your hard drive untouched is the ultimate goal to avoid going from compressed/encoded to decompressed/decoded (HDMI/Component) and then back to compressed/encoded and hope that your capture card supports the original video codec to avoid switching to another codec which results in more quality loss than what it already is, However it is not always possible to achieve that goal due to copyright protection or hardware limitation so capturing is the only option available as long as you are not breaking the fair use act.

[ezcapper]

The attached video is an encode from one of these magewell copies (Unisheen), not great not terrible. $105 is about the right price for one of these.

ffmpeg command crf 17, preset ultrafast, pixel format yuv420:

ffmpeg -f dshow -rtbufsize 702000k -i video="USB3.0 Capture Video":audio="Digital Audio Interface (USB3.0 Capture Audio)" -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 17 -preset ultrafast -acodec pcm_s16le unisheen.mkv

[ezcapper]

2 more files to post in this thread. For anyone with this card, I am able to get the right audio sync using vlc 2.x. The aspect ratio was tricky, because magewell mentions that the cards defaults to 16:10. You can leave out the "aspect=16:9" to save cpu if you have large hardrive and do a shell script instead. After a command similar to the one below, you would have to type " ffmpeg -i ezcapper.avi -c copy -aspect 16:9 ezcapper2.avi" then something like " rm ezcapper.avi " Also, if getting a constant framerate is a concern, you would want to use this as an intermediate file and run it through handbrake

cvlc v4l2:///dev/video1 :input-slave="alsa://hw:1,0" :sout="#transcode{vcodec=h264,venc=x264{qp=0,preset=ultrafast}, vfilter=canvas{aspect=16:9}, width=1920,height=1080}:duplicate{dst=file{dst=/home/ezcapper/ezcappers.avi,no-overwrite}" :sout-keep --run-time=15 --stop-time=15 vlc://quit

I will post one more once I assemble a computer that can handle 60 fields per second. Then there is smoother motion than this file. This capture is done on pentium 2020m laptop.

x264 qp 0 file with unencoded audio for full image and audio quality: