HDMI to USB Capture Card Roundup

I'm looking for a cheap USB3 HDMI capture card.

These aren't capture "cards" in the traditional sense, but that's the way I still think about them.

My last captures were done using a Brooktree / Conexant bt878 PCI bus card on an ancient Linux desktop, so the silicon miniaturization and cost reduction available for the price of a burger at Five Guys is still a bit mind blowing.

But that card blasted full uncompressed data into my system, which I wanted, to capture as much lossless detail from analog media as I could.

The USB Video Class capture devices are a very mixed bag, and it's quite hard to know which ones are worth anything at all, even if they are cheaper than (fish and) chips.

In the spirit of my last big blog post on dodgy Chinese hardware (see: USB serial adapter shootout), here's a post about the various USB capture cards I could find on eBay.

To help people cross-reference these devices with eBay, I've copied in all of the marketing pictures I can find to these blog posts.

And I'm adding the output from dmesg, lsusb, and v4l2-ctl.

It's not easy to find brand names on these devices, nobody from Shenzhen will stand behind them, and I am too cheap to get a proper Magewell or Startech device.

I'll link to the Dongle subpages here, as each one has more info than fits on this page.

Dongle 0: Macrosilicon MS2109 - The One I Have

Dongle 1: Macrosilicon MS2130(?) - Updated Version of The One I Have

Dongle 2: Macrosilicon MS2109(?) - Rounded Metal, No Tail, USB A Plug

Dongle 3: Macrosilicon MS2131 - Magewell / Ugreen Look-Alike