Budget video capture device?

Boomer0108 · April 19, 2020

Hey guys and gals,

I come to you with a request.

I have been tasked with upgrading my church's streaming setup. We are significantly on a budget.

Here's what we are doing right now:

We have a 2015 MacBook Pro which our pastor provided. We are using the pastor's iPhone 11 as a camera, using the OBS Camera software to connect it to OBS on the Mac. It's connected over USB.

We're hitting an average of 16 fps. From what I can tell, this is a limitation of the OBS Camera software (it also throws some screwball resolutions at random).

We have cameras we can use, so for the time being, that's not an issue (later down the road when we can afford to upgrade them, we will).

What we need is a video capture device, that can connect preferably over USB (so we can upgrade the computer when budget allows)

We're looking for cheap but reliable. We don't need anything extravagant. Hell, we would be happy even getting 30fps and 720p.

What do you guys suggest?

Bombastinator · April 19, 2020

15 minutes ago, Boomer0108 said:

Hey guys and gals,

I come to you with a request.

I have been tasked with upgrading my church's streaming setup. We are significantly on a budget.

Here's what we are doing right now:

We have a 2015 MacBook Pro which our pastor provided. We are using the pastor's iPhone 11 as a camera, using the OBS Camera software to connect it to OBS on the Mac. It's connected over USB.

We're hitting an average of 16 fps. From what I can tell, this is a limitation of the OBS Camera software (it also throws some screwball resolutions at random).

We have cameras we can use, so for the time being, that's not an issue (later down the road when we can afford to upgrade them, we will).

What we need is a video capture device, that can connect preferably over USB (so we can upgrade the computer when budget allows)

We're looking for cheap but reliable. We don't need anything extravagant. Hell, we would be happy even getting 30fps and 720p.

What do you guys suggest?

Dude on YouTube literally just did a video on this almost exact thing. Only difference was the church computer was a 2015 Mac mini. His solution was $1200 and was overkill according to even him. Might be worth a look at any rate. From what I saw he included 3 different systems for video streaming, any one of which would work fine. There was big processor for h264 so it could do it on the cpu, there was an Nvidia 1660, which had a hardware streaming codec, and there was a dedicated streaming card that could do 4k@60hz.