Back in 2015 I got myself a brand new Elgato Game Capture HD. At the time, it was one of the best capture cards on the consumer market; it has HDMI passthrough, Standard definition inputs with very reasonable analog-to-digital converters, and decent enough support for a range of different setups.
Despite its age, I still find it very handy, especially for non-HDMI inputs, but the original design is saddled with flaws which prevent it from taking advantage of its entire potential. This is how I built a better one.
Using this card in the field
After a few months of using it to capture PS3 footage and even making some crude streaming setups for small events using a camera with a clean HDMI output, two very big flaws were quickly apparent: First, the plastic case’s hermetic design and lack of thermal management solutions made it run really hot, which after prolonged operation resulted in dropouts which sometimes required disconnecting and reconnecting the device and/or its inputs, and second, the SD inputs are very frustrating; the connectors are non-standard and the dongles provided are iffy and don’t even allow for taking full advantage of its capabilities without tracking down some long discontinued accessories.
My first modification to it was rather crude: after it failed on a livestream, I took the Dremel to it and made a couple of holes for ventilation, coupled with an old PC fan that I ran using USB power (the undervolting of the fan provided enough cooling without being deafening). This obviously worked, but it introduced more problems: the card now made noise, which could be picked up by microphones, and it now had a big gaping hole with rotating blades that was just waiting to snatch a fingernail. This wouldn’t do.
Solving thermal issues
It quicly became clear that the original case for the Elgato Game Capture HD was a thermal design nightmare: it provided no passive cooling, neither by having heatsinks or vents. The outer case design was sleek, but it sacrificed stability on the way.
This device is packed with chips, all of which provide different functions: HDMI receivers and transmitters, ADCs, RAM, and many other glue logic parts, which meant that power consumption was going to be high. Having a custom LSI solution or even using FPGAs could have been better in terms of power consumption, but this is often way more expensive. Amongst all of the ICs, one stood out in terms of heat generation: a Fujitsu MB86H58 H.264 Full HD Transcoder. This was doing all the leg work in terms of picking up a video stream and packaging into a compressed stream and piping it through a USB 2.0 connection. It’s pretty advanced stuff for the time, and it even boasts about it’s low power consumption in the datasheet. I don’t know exactly why it runs so hot, but it does, and past a certain threshold it struggles and stutters to keep a video signal moving.
There was nothing worth saving in the original enclosure, so I whipped up a new one in Fusion 360 which includes many ventilation holes, and enough space above the chip so I could add a chipset heatsink from an old motherboard. I stuck it down with double sided tape, which is not particularly thermally conductive, but along with the improved ventilation is enough to keep the chip to frying itself to oblivion. I ran another protracted test, and none of the chips got hot enough to raise suspicion, and even after three hours of continuous video, the image was still being received appropriately. I initially though there could be other chips in need of heatsinks, but it appears that the heat from this transcoder was the one pushing it over the edge, without it the other ICs got barely warm.
Since we made a new enclosure, let’s do something about that SD input.
Redesigning the SD video inputs
This card hosts a very healthy non-HDMI feature set: It supports composite video, S-Video, and Y/Pb/Pr component video, along with stereo audio. The signal is clean and the deinterlacing is perfectly serviceable, which makes it a good candidate for recording old gaming consoles and old analog media like VHS or Video8/Hi8. However, Elgato condensed all of these signals into a single non-standard pseudo-miniDIN plug, which mated with included dongles. Along with a PlayStation AV MULTI connector, it came with a component breakout dongle which allowed any source to be used. With the included instructions you could even get composite video in this way. S-Video however was much more of a pain; while it was possible to connect an S-Video signal straight into the plug, it left you without audio, and the official solution for this was to purchase an additional dongle which of course by the time I got it no one had.
To solve it, I started by simply desoldering the connector off the board. I saw some tutorials on how to modify S-Video plugs for the 7-pin weirdness of the Elgato, and even considered placing a special order for them, but in the end I realized that it was moot. The dongles sat very loosely on the connector, and any expansion I wished to make on it was going to be limited by that connector, so I just removed it.
To the now exposed pad, I soldered an array of panel-mount RCA and S-Video connectors I pulled out of an old projector, so I could use them with whatever standard I pleased: three jacks for Y/Pb/Pr component video, a jack for S-Video, a jack for composite video, and two jacks for stereo audio, complete with their proper colors too. The SD input combines the different standards into a single three-wire bus: Pb (component blue) is also S-Video chroma (C), Pr (component red) is also composite video, and Y (component green) is S-Video Luma (Y), so the new connectors are electrically connected to the others, but for simplicity I much prefer it to having to remember which one is which, or having to keep track of adapters for S-Video (which I use a lot for old camcorders).
Final assembly and finished product
After printing the new enclosure I slotted in the board (it was made for a press fit with the case, to avoid using additional fasteners), and soldered the new plugs to the bare pads of the connector using thin wire from an old IDE cable. The connectors were attached to the case using small screws, and the design was such that all of the connectors were on the bottom side of the case, which meant no loose wires. The top stays in place using small pieces of double sided tape and some locating pins, which makes dissassembly easy, great for future works or just showing off.
I wish this was the product I received from Elgato. It allows the hardware to work to its true potential, and it makes it infinitely more useful in daily usage. No more faffing around with dongles, no more moving parts, or dropouts on a hot day. It feels like this was what the engineers at Elgato envisioned when they came out with this thing. The Elgato Game Capture HD is now my main non-HD capture device and even for HDMI stuff it still gets some usage, when I can’t be bothered to set up the ATEM switcher.
Finishing thoughts
I love the Elgato Game Capture HD, both for what it is capable of doing and what it did to the nascent streaming and video creation scene back in it’s day. I love its featureset and I’m even fond of its quirks, but with this mod I feel like I have its true potential available without compromises. It changed its place in my toolkit from a thing I kinda know how to use that stays in the bottom of my drawer to a proven and reliable piece of equipment. If you have one of these devices and feel unsatisfied with its performance, I urge you to give it a try, you will no doubt notice the difference and maybe you’ll keep it from going into the bin.