video – Benjamin Santelices

A couple of years ago I wrote an article on how I cobbled together livestreaming hardware at the very beginning of the pandemic. Finding AV equipment was very difficult, so I did what I could with what I had. Almost three years have passed since then, and in the meantime I built a multi-camera, simulcasting capable, live event oriented livestreaming solution on a shoestring budget. Many compromises were made, many frustrations were had, but it worked.

This is how I built it and made it work.

Why bother changing it?

After my initial stint doing a couple of livestreams for small events, the requirements kept popping up, for simple one camera setups my equipment would do, but it quickly started falling short; and as venues slowly started filling back up with people, I just couldn’t rely on building the event around the camera. I had to find a way to do this without being intrusive, and to be able to fulfill my clients’ needs.

Lessons from the previous setup

The setup I described in the previous writeup was not free of complications. On the video side, I was limited by a single HDMI input, and any switching solutions I had were too rough for my geriatric capture card; it would take way too long to reacquire a picture. On the audio side, my trusty USB interface was good, but way too finicky and unreliable (the drivers were crap, the knobs were crap, and while I got it for free it just wasn’t worth the hassle) for me to be comfortable using it for actual work. I also had a single camera, very short cable runs, no support for mobile cameras, and an overall jankiness that just would not cut it for bigger events.

A new centerpiece: ATEM Mini

My first gripe was my capture card. I was using an Elgato GameCapture HD, a capture device I bought back in 2014 which could barely do 1080p30. I still like it for its non-HD inputs (which I have extensively modified and a story for another time), but the single HDMI input, the long acquisition times, and the near three second delay in the video stream made it super janky to use in practice.

After a month and a half on a waiting list, I managed to get my hands on a Blackmagic ATEM Mini, the basic model, and it changed everything: it has four HDMI inputs, an HDMI mix output, USB-C interface, and two stereo audio interfaces, along with fully fledged live video and audio processing: transitions between sources, automatic audio switching, picture-in-picture, chroma and luma keying, still image display, audio dynamics and EQ control and so much more. Its rugged buttons and companion app make operating the ATEM Mini an absolute breeze, and its extensive functionality and integration makes it the closest thing to an all-in-one solution. Many things that I did using lots of devices and maximum jankiness were consolidated in this one device. Anyone who is getting into livestreaming should get one of these.

Dejankifying my audio

Having good audio is almost more important than having good video; a stream with mediocre video but good audio is serviceable, one with good video and bad audio is almost unbearable. Because most events I work on have live audiences on-site, there is no need for me to handle microphones or other audio equipment directly: most mixers have a secondary output I can tap into and get a stereo mix that I can pipe into the ATEM Mini. For line-level unbalanced inputs I can connect them straight into the ATEM, and if I needed something more involved like multiple audio sources, preamplification, or any sort of basic analog processing I keep a small Phonic AM440D mixer in my equipment case, which gives me endless flexibility for audio inputs.

One of the advantages of using common hardware for audio and video is that both streams are synchronized by default, which removes the need for delaying the audio stream entirely, which once again reduces the complexity of setting up livestreams in the field.

New cameras and solving the HDMI distance limitation

For a while, a single Panasonic HDC-TM700 was my only video source, with an additional Sony camera on loan for some events. This was one of my biggest limitations, which I set out to fix.

Most semi-pro/pro cameras are way too expensive for my needs: even standard consumer cameras are way out of my budget, a single camera like the one I already have would need a couple of months worth of revenue, which given that I’m still at university I couldn’t ramp up. There are ways out though.

For one, I thought about USB webcams. There are some good ones on the market right now that are more than enough for livestreaming, but they are very much on the expensive side and I have never liked them for something like this: poor performance at low light, small, low quality lenses and fixed apertures, and low bitrates are just a few of my gripes. Also, I had a better capture card that could take advantage of HDMI cameras. So I looked around AliExpress, and found exactly what I was looking for: Process Cameras.

A process camera is essentially a security camera with an HDMI output. They have no screen, fixed (although decent quality and reasonably large) lenses, and a perfectly usable dynamic range. Since the do not have a screen or autofocus capabilities they are best used for fixed shots, but most of my streams rarely require movement (for which I have the other camera). Best of all: they were very cheap, at around $100 a piece if you included a tripod.

Now, we need to talk about HDMI: It’s a perfectly good standard for home use, but it has some problems in this use case (which we can forgive, this is very much an edge case), the biggest one being max distance. HDMI rarely works above 10m, and even 5m is challenging without active cables and devices that can actually drive cables that long. There are optical cables which can take them over the 10m mark, but these are expensive, bulky, and stiff, which complicates using them in events where they could end up in the way. The solution is somewhat counter-intuitive: just don’t use HDMI cables. But isn’t it the best way to do it in this case? Yes!

See, just because we’re using HDMI signals doesn’t mean we need to adhere strictly to the electrical specification as long as we can get the message across while converting it to a physical medium better suited for long distances. There are many ways of doing this, some use coaxial cables and HD-SDI, others use simple fiber optic patch cables, but I went for old twisted-pair Cat5e: It’s cheap, it’s available, and there are ready-made converters with an HDMI connector on one side and a 8P8C plug on the other. Add a 3D-printed bracket for mounting it on the side of the camera and some small HDMI patch cables and we’re off. With these converters I can get 25m runs no problem, and even 75m in extreme cases, which is enough for most venues.

This was not the only use for a 3D printer: I made custom power bars which hang from a tripod’s center hook, for powering cameras and converters.

Better networking and server equipment

In my previous article I used a Raspberry Pi 3B+ to run an NGINX server with the appropiate RTMP module and some extra software to make a simulcasting server, where a single stream can feed multiple endpoints. This worked great, but Raspberry Pis are a bit anemic and I wanted something with a bit more oomph in case I wanted to do more with it. The idea of a portable server is useful for me not only for streaming, so I grabbed a 2011 Mac Mini on Facebook Marketplace, swapped the hard drive with an SSD and off I went. The additional RAM (4GB instead of just 1GB) allows me to have more services set up without worrying about resources and the beefier Intel Processor allows me more freedom to run concurrent tasks. There is even some QSV work I could do to use hardware encoding and decoding, but that’s a story for another time.

I also ditched my 16-port rackmount switch in exchange for a cheap Netgear WNDR3400v2 wireless router, which gives me a nice hotspot for connecting my phone or in case someone else needs it; the new router is much lighter too.

A portable camera jank-o-rama

For a couple of scenarios, I really needed a portable camera that was fully untethered; maybe for showcasing something, or to keep an eye on the action while on the move. There are some wireless HDMI solutions but it always felt like loosing a good camera for an entire shoot (I usually run a one-man operation, so it was pretty much always a short run for the portable camera), and the cost argument kept popping up.

The way I solved it is to me as janky as it is genius: just use your phone. Most modern phones have excellent cameras, decent audio, and even optical stabilization. I used Larix, a streaming app to create a streaming server that I broadcast over WiFi (see why I needed a wireless router?) to be picked up by OBS. Unreliable? a little bit. Has it ever mattered? Not really, this capability is more of a novelty and a fun thing to add to my repertoire, but not meant as a centerpiece. I have even toyed with a GoPro Hero 7 Black streaming to my RTMP server and picking it up from there, which works, albeit with lots of lag. It’s a bit of a pain to not have it in my ATEM switchboard and having to switch it over OBS, but, you know, it’ll do.

Miscellaneous

Until now I carried everyting on a duffel bag, which just wasn’t going to work anymore: the weight killed my back anytime I went near the thing and there just wasn’t enough space: so I needed something like the big wooden cases that the pro audio industry uses, without breaking the bank. I just took an old hard-side suitcase and crammed everything in it. It’s big enough for me to house most of my stuff but not too big as to be bulky, and allowed me to keep everything tidy but without wasting space.

Because my new cameras don’t have a screen, setting up the shot and focusing can be a challenge. I usually resorted to using my second monitor to do so, but it was always janky and time consuming. To solve this, I bought a CCTV camera tester with an HDMI input. This is essentialy a monitor with a battery, for way less than a professional one.

I needed lots of cables, some of them really long. I ended up buying rolls of power and Cat5E cable and made them myself. My standard kit includes four 25m Cat5E rolls and a 75m one in case the network jack is far away, plus three 20m extension cords so I can place the cameras wherever I want. This is not including the three power bars for the cameras and a fourth one for my computer.

So what comes next?

To be absolutely honest, I think this is as far as this setup goes. Livestreaming jobs have dried up now that the pandemic has quietened down, and pursuing more stable ventures would require lots of investment, which I’m not really in a position to make. I found a niche during the pandemic, and I milked it as much as I could, I’ve paid for the equipment two or three times already, so I’m not complaining, but until I find the time to do that YouTube channel I’ve always wanted to do, I don’t think it’s going to see the light of day for a while.

Closing thoughts

I’ve had some tremendous fun building up this setup, and for my uses, it has proven itself time and again as a dependable if basic setup. Maybe you can get your own ideas to get creative; many of the lessons learned here are very much applicable to other streaming opportunities and who knows, maybe you’ll get some ideas to get creative with this media.

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.