Did anyone try (with success) connecting a HDMI video grabber to DVI port of your MorphOS machine? I recently did (through an adapter), but without any luck. The video is passed through the recorder to the output port, but I cannot record it. Anybody knows why?

I have a tried two cheap hdmi grabber, the only problem I have is that some pixels from the right are cut off and then the video is stretched to 1920x1080 pixels.

In the FlowStudio thread I post a youtube video showing howto create a new project in FlowStudio, there you can see what I mean.

@koszer:

I had the same problem, even I set the output to 1280x720 or 1980x1080. I asked the hardware support about it. The answer was, that the Computer/OS seems not to send a standard 720p or 1080p signal the pixel numbers are right but the timings are wrong. I tested with some other sources, DVD, PS4, Linux-PC, and it worked fine.

In the end I send mine back and got refunded.

[ Edited by ALB42 13.06.2018 - 16:22 ]

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Yeah, I've tried different resolutions too. Then, I've tried DVI output not only on G5 PowerMac, but on G4 PowerBook and not only MorphOS, but OSX as well. But no luck - the recording just doesn't work. So it's not really OS feature, I guess. I'll try tinkering with firmware if everything else fails (I'm not sending it back, in the worst scenario I'll give it away to my son).
I wonder if it would work OK with standard HDMI input if there was some Radeon HD (AGP version) in my PowerMac, but we will have to wait for a while to check it.

sure, I do not blame MorphOS for this the support just said it could be either the graphic card or driver or operating system driving it at the wrong settings.

I played with the Screen settings but it did not work.

I planed to try a little bit more expensive type (Elgato) later.

I would like to do some tutorials with a grabber hardware but doesn't work too

This is strange. We must be missing something vital here, something intangible yet crucial to all that recording stuff.

@igracki: What is this model that's "almost working" for you?

Grabber hardware and cheap adapters are generally very picky regarding resolutions. So you are usually better trying to route the signal through some good quality scaler. So the catch is, they're expensive.

I have an Extron DSC 301 HD, which has a HDMI-In at least, and can provide a wide range of output signals, basically anything a HDMI recorder might expect. I think this would be a good option to record video from MorphOS computers, although I haven't tested this yet with my Extron.

A second hand DSC 301 HD goes between 100 and 250 EUR on eBay at this point. Note that the Extron Firmware updates are paid though, but for private eBay users they're usually quite friendly, we got access to some updates from them after explaining that we use their equipment we bought second hand on non-profit events... (Yes, demoparties. :) )

I actually wanted to test MorphOS recording via this thing for a long time now. Gimme a few days, i'll try to upload something to YouTube.

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AFAIR, I had to pick a pre-defined monitor profile in MorphOS with standard resolutions to get an image with my grabbing hardware. I would need to look up which profile it was.

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Personally, I had successfully tested grabbing with a Hauppauge card.

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I have a box which looks like this.

The firmware of this box also works with my box.


I bought it from Amazon. But it was cheaper when I bought it;)

Well, just to follow up on this, ironically, my pro scaler also has difficulty grabbing the DVI out from my PowerBook 5,8 or also Mac mini (when running MorphOS, or also OpenFirmware, funnily enough, but it works in OSX tho'), while VGA works perfectly. But of course with some quality loss compared to DVI, although still looks quite OK when recorded in 1080p@30, which is the best my older HDMI recorder can do. I do have a whole lot of EDID options tho', to play with on the scaler, so which I had no time for yet.

Weekend, hopefully. :)

Grabbed a video with a Mac Mini MOS 3.10 and an Elgato Game Capture HD60.
Resolution: 1920x1080 (1080P60 according to the monitor)


This grabber can allso record the Openfirmware screen of the Mac Mini btw.

Finally got my chain working, so I made a quick and boring and very uninteresting test recording, but it shows the quality I got:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS4zbIebg24

This one is in 1080p@30. Sadly that's the maximum my (older Blackmagic Hyperdeck Shuttle) HDMI recorder can process, the alternatives would be 1080i@60 or 720p@60.

So basically you use a scaler (Extron DSC 301 HD) to get your DVI output into HDMI input of your recorder?

TL;DR: Yes. I consider this a "proper" solution if you do a lot of recording. If someone only wants to do occasional recording, it might be too expensive, that's true.

Longer: :)

Yes, although I could connect it directly too with a DVI to HDMI adapter (if the recorder could do 1080p@60), but as the existence of this thread shows, that does not always work. From experience, dealing with recording from retro/exotic systems is much easier if you have a good scaler which just cleans things up for you. The scaler also takes care to also mix in the audio to HDMI from the analog output of the PowerBook. (HDMI recorders don't always have analog jack inputs, mine doesn't for example.)

With the same chain I can record everything from a C64 (well, CVBS only, but it's still quite decent quality), to retro PCs, to classic Amiga, and to MorphOS in 1080p in reasonable quality, and I do not have to worry if the usually quite picky recording device is willing to recognize the signal my system outputs, as these scalers were designed to take all sorts of crap, and output a standard signal which then "just works", and do good quality resizing, all sorts of framerate conversion, make sure the audio is in sync, etc, and the output signal will always be exactly what you set.

I could hook up my Pegasos II/G4 for example, which is still set to 1024 since 2004. :) And do a similar recording just fine, even in full HD, to avoid YouTube dumbing down the quality after upload, and so on. So it's more expensive, but it has several advantages.

Additionally, the scaler alone can also be used for presentation purposes, when you need to show the system live on some random projector on an event or so, which can be also problematic, for example, if you change resolution a lot of times, like when presenting an Amiga demo, and it changes between interlace/nolace, or you have a more traditional Amiga-RTG alike MorphOS setup with different screen resolutions, some beamers can take ages to sync on every change, the scaler fixes that too, usually.

Just a warning here - HDMI may support hotplugging on paper, but you should be very careful about doing it. I've HDMI<->something else adapters ruined for no apparent reason, and spent many hours scratching my head at what I thought were incompatible signals when the adapter was just dead and had been dead since the first time I pulled it.

I think it's something to do with the potential between two different earths. All computers and most monitors are earthed. External boxes like grabbers often aren't. But who knows really. Either give sacrifice to the HDMI god or turn things off before plugging them in to be safe.

I have now a "Elgato Game Capture HD" which can record the MorphOS image if you set the screen mode to "1280x720 (50Hz 37.5kHz) 720p". I use it with Linux Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) but also at Windows it should work ;)
An example:
https://youtu.be/fZeLc6nZrqE

[ Edited by ALB42 23.06.2018 - 17:30 ]

> I have an Extron DSC 301 HD [...]

Might be of use for owners of this hardware:

https://blog.alb42.de/2018/08/31/extroncontrol-for-extron-dsc-301-hd/

It just came to me I didn't present my solution here. Well, I got it working, finally. Oddly enough I had to use a D-SUB to HDMI converter (DeLock). The wiring went like:

1. DVI to D-SUB adapter
2. D-SUB to HDMI adapter
3. HDMI cable connected to video grabber
4. HDMI to DVI adapter
5. My A1082 Cinema Display through DVI cable

Weird, I know. Slightly crazy, I admit. But it worked!

Back and forth to D-Sub, as in, analog VGA? If so, you're basically using the analog VGA compatible part of DVI there, and you're converting that to HDMI then. The conversion might also change some of the timings during these conversions, hence "fixing" it for your recorder. Also, it's roughly the same as recording from analog VGA then.

Might solve the problem in your particular use case, but it's not a solution I'd advise in general. :)

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I woudn't too, but well - it works. And the DeLock adapter costed me like 10 EUR total, so I got away quite cheap.

New Version of the Extron DSC 301 HD control software with MUI GUI.




https://blog.alb42.de/2018/11/03/extroncontrol-0-1/

OK, I've figured out it's the gfx card issue after all. When I switched my card to Radeon X1900GT the problem disappeared. No doubled adapters needed, only DVI to HDMI.

I bought this cheap (under 20e) HDMI capture device, and it seems to work with my MorphOS setup. Image quality isn't perfect and seems to have some sharpening which makes it look a bit different than it should be, but seems to work in various resolutions and it's still quite ok. It can also be that I just can't use grabbing software (OBS) well enough yet... Here are some videos I've made so far.

It would be nice to have USB VHI drivers compiled for MorphOS. That way "driverless" webcams and capturers should work ootb. Or perhaps Linux video capture standard lib could be ported