Avermedia ER130 capture testing

The Avermedia ER130 is a standalone HDMI recorder. It can record up to 1080p at 30fps or 720p at 60fps. It is compatible with SD and HD input resolutions. It is really picky about the resolutions and refresh rates. From my testing I found that only the standard resolitons work: 480i60, 480p60, 576i50, 576p50, 720p50, 720p60, 1080p40, 1080p60. Anything in between and you cannot capture it. Passthrough works though.

240p and 288p
I had no success with this. I tried a PAL PS1 with PAL and NTSC games and tried a Wii running emulators but the ER130 displayed that the resolution is unsupported. The only way I could capture 240p sources was line2x 480p. I tried the OSSC's other line multipliers but only line2x was compatible. 1080p output is possible with the OSSC however the refresh rate depend on your console and I had no luck with this either.

480i and 576i
These are captured as is. The captured video is interlaced and at a pretty low 5Mbps average. This means that deinterlacing in post gives pretty mushy image because you are combining highly compressed fields. I suggest capture progressive sources if possible or deinterlacing the video signal before capture. Since youtube can't deinterlace video, I used mediacoder to do it.

480p and 576p
These look much nicer but the bitrate is still around 5Mbps. Also if you want to record 16:9 content you can but it is not flagged as 16:9 because it is anamorphic. You have to adjust the aspect ratio in post. This video is 480p linedoubled from 240p.


720p
This seems to be the sweet spot. 50 and 60Hz can be recorded. The bitrate is around 15Mbps which is allright. With low detail sources (Rayman) or slow movement it is great. Complex scenes however show low quality compression (Demon's Souls)


1080p
This can only be recorded at 30fps at 20Mbps. On paper this seems fine however compression is low quality here as well. It's fine for Youtube but not great for capturing the quality of the graphics.

HDMI passthrough
When in standby the passthrough works as real passthrough, the output resolution matches the input resolution. However when capturing the HDMI output has some terrible scaling artifacts and no 1080p60 is possible, it switches to 1080i60. Other resolutions are output as is.

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