Aver DarkCrystal HD Capture Station C874

[havelka]

Hi,I need your help.

I bought C874 for capturing SD videosignal from cameras for streaming. But in my casting SW (VJDirector, Wirecast, VidBlaster,..) video inputs aren't available. When I check it in Aver capturing SW Totalmedia Extreme everything works OK.
When I asked on AVER support they wrote me, that C874 driver doesn't support 3th party SW.
Could someone help me???

Ales

[usually_quiet]

The only third-party software that I have heard of of that works with the Aver DarkCrystal HD Capture Station C874 is Windows 7's Media Center, with a special plugin from AVerMedia installed that makes the H.264 transport stream look like it is coming from from a digital TV tuner card with BDA drivers.

Third-party software support for capture devices that do hardware-encoding is usually not very good. Those that use software for encoding tend to be better supported, but real-time H.264 encoding take a lot of CPU power, and probably won't equal the quality obtainable from hardware H.264 encoding.

[LightWeightProducer]

I can't speak for all capture devices but in terms of SD formats x264 in profiles that exceed realtime on a core2quad easily bests the c874 in terms of quality per bit. The problem with the c874 is that its variable rate mode has a fairly narrow averaging window requiring a higher than expected encoding rate to avoid rate shaping kicking in and producing artifacting. Hauppauge's PVR-2xx and 1xx MPEG-2 encoder cards had the same issue.

[usually_quiet]

I can't speak for all capture devices but in terms of SD formats x264 in profiles that exceed realtime on a core2quad easily bests the c874 in terms of quality per bit. The problem with the c874 is that its variable rate mode has a fairly narrow averaging window requiring a higher than expected encoding rate to avoid rate shaping kicking in and producing artifacting. Hauppauge's PVR-2xx and 1xx MPEG-2 encoder cards had the same issue.

Unfortunately, we don't know what kind of CPU the OP has at his disposal. People who buy USB devices that do hardware encoding, like the c874, often use them with a typical laptop that doesn't have a fast quad core.

[havelka]

I use notebook HP Pavillion with i5 core, 8 GB RAM,...

[usually_quiet]

I use notebook HP Pavillion with i5 core, 8 GB RAM,...

Because you are using a notebook, you need to use an external capture device. The problem is that USB 2.0 devices which can capture high-definition video all use hardware encoding. The Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle is the only external high definition-capture device for Windows that I know of that does not use hardware encoding, but it has a USB 3.0 interface, and it does not work with all USB 3.0 controllers. If you wanted to use it, you would need to do some research to make sure it works with your laptop.

However, since the camera signal is standard-definition, you can try a standard-definition USB capture device to experiment with software encoding and find out if it allows you to use the software you want to use for streaming. A good standard-definition USB capture device is less expensive than what you are using now, but the list of devices to choose from varies by country. The small standard-definition USB capture devices that resemble a USB flash drive tend to use software for encoding. Larger ones may use hardware encoding.