Razer Ripsaw (or Avermedia LGX) quick review

[wwenze]

I feel a need to write my observations somewhere... after reading lots of reviews on both this and Elgato HD60s, seeing lots of problems mentioned regarding both, and seeing lots of reviews that are just plain technically incorrect.

Like this review that claims the Elgato HD60s can only record up to 40 mbps
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/05/elgato-hd60-s-capture-card-review-great-but-theres-a-catch/

Furthermore, you're still dealing with the same recording constraints as before. The HD60 S will only record up to 40 mbps per second, less than the 60 mbps the HD60 Pro is capable of. It's also not as impressive as the uncompressed footage that the Razer Ripsaw or the AverMedia Live Gamer Extreme can process.

This is easy to guess it is false. (And that statement regarding HD60 Pro too.)

And even this guy claiming that the Razer Ripsaw can only do 1080i
https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/5ts08u/just_compared_the_elgato_hd60s_and_the_razer/
and that HD60s uses USB 3.1 with increased bandwidth than 3.0 (It doesn't - HD60s uses USB 3.0 with a USB-C connector, info straight from manufacturer)

But captures done by other people clearly show 1080p.
Googling shows other people with resolution or stability issues that are due to USB 3.0 controller compatibility. At least most people make the correct decision to ask and troubleshoot, and not upright make incorrect claims without checking. Almost stinks of a paid review.

And then lots of reviews done by people who are simply just new to video capture... like complaining why CPU usage is so high and captured videos are stuttering.

The problem with having lots of technically mistaken reviews floating around, is that it makes it hard to see if performance inadequacies are caused by the object between keyboard and chair or caused by the actual product. And this is information I hope I am able to provide. Also an FAQ on how to solve problems that originate from between keyboard and chair.

And BTW I'm calling it Razer Ripsaw (or Avermedia LGX) because they are the same hardware. There can be differences in actual usage since the drivers are different, and honestly I'm trusting Avermedia more than Razer (Or rather should I say I don't trust Razer). For one, Razer doesn't let you download the drivers alone and you are forced to install Razer Synapse to install the drivers. For two, Avermedia provides a diagnostic software that tells you whether your computer's USB controller is good enough.

https://insider.razerzone.com/index...ve-gamer-extreme-lgx-why-go-with-razer.24411/

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Capture cards are kinda strange to review, like many other things including but not limited to cables, and USB hubs/controllers.
With things like HDD and ODD, you can measure the transfer speeds and burn quality. With keyboard and mouse, you can review how they feel. With capture cards, they either just work or don't.

When perfect performance (as in performing up to the stated spec) is easy to hit and we expect the product to be performing perfectly, reviews of capture cards become whether it has any imperfections.

And USB 3.0 capture solutions... I expected them to be full of problems, based on the comments I've seen on the net. But is it really?

Where are the major problems that people are mentioning?

Of course, it has minor problems, which I will try to distinguish from the problems not due to to product itself.

So... FAQ section.

The YouTube video has quite a lot of stuttering. I have a spanky new computer. Also I'm watching it on FireFox or some other web browser, and all 1080p60 videos I have watched are stuttering.
- If you are on FireFox, try Chrome - it stutters significantly less. But best if you download the 1080p60 file using Complete YouTube Saver plugin for FireFox and play in MPC-HC

The video has quite a lot of stuttering. I'm playing using MPC-HC or other local player. Also I'm using onboard GPU and a CPU of i3/i5/i7-4xxx or earlier
- If using MPC-HC, select Video Mixing Renderer 9 (Windowed) instead of Enhanced Video Renderer (custom presenter). Intel HD graphics gen 8 and earlier has performance issues with EVR(cp) and 60p.

The Razer Ripsaw (or Avermedia LGX) will run into resolution and stability issues if it isn't used with a compatible USB controller. So what USB controller is needed?
- Avermedia actually mentions this in their FAQ:
http://www.avermedia.com/gaming/support_faq/live_gamer_extreme#faq_part

Spoiler

● Check your computer has Intel chipset with native USB 3.0 host controller

I'm running Skylake on H110M-ITX and my controller is called Intel(R) USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller - 1.0 (Microsoft)
So you don't need an expensive mobo to work.

There is some stuttering in OBS preview although the captured video is more smooth
- This is something I experience with multiple cards including a PCI-E one. Blame OBS basically. I'm still looking for a solution.

Captured videos are stuttering like mad, and I'm using x264
- Well yea, that is what you should expect from CPU-based capturing solution. Try using veryfast CPU usage preset and have at least 2 full cores available for encoding. That allows me to do 720p60. For 1080p60, seriously consider GPU-hardware-accelerated solutions.

Captured videos are stuttering like mad, and I'm using Quick Sync
- Quick Sync encoding performance seems to suffer if the GPU is doing something else, like playing a game. My gameplay played and captured with Intel GPU and Quick Sync when my GTX 1060 isn't available is saved @ around 1fps. Even though the game itself is smooth.

Same can be said for YouTube / MPC-HC videos in the background, basically anything that uses GPU acceleration. Just make sure they are all off if you want the best performance.

Ok, now that the major PBKAC issues are out of the way,

The video captured by Razer Ripsaw has some stuttering. I verified this by going frame by frame.
- Yup, it does. Every few hundred frames, there will be a frame dropped. Sometimes a few will drop close to each other. But the minimum fps still stays at at least 30fps (i.e. at least one undropped frame between two dropped frames)
This is without buffering. With buffering, frame drop happens every thousand frames or so. (Note that these are all just extremely inaccurate guesstimates. Unless somebody writes a program to detect frame drops.)
So now, we finally arrive at something that is caused by the capture card. I suspect something to do with the USB bus* being held up, because it happens with 720p too. And if it was bandwidth issues it would have been more regular anyway instead of dropped frames at random times. So I believe the Ripsaw (or LGX) is capable of perfect capture, and I'll be working towards troubleshooting that.
- This is caused by OBS, and does not occur (or at least not as frequently) on VirtualDub. See follow up post.

For most games that don't run at constant 60fps it probably doesn't matter anyway. And people might say the Ripsaw is 100% smooth in those reviews.

So there we have it. Is this better than the HD60s? Hell if I would know, I don't have a HD60s, and as mentioned above all the reviews floating on the net are just making things difficult. I read horror stories about HD60s too: Stability issues, lag in OBS (By a guy who doesn't have lag with Avermedia, so he has some experience with what he's doing.) Not being able to work with OBS is a major issue for me since I would be using the preview window a lot. Color differences between Elgato and Avermedia, with the Elgato being more vibrant - and I'm scared of "more vibrant" because it usually means "more wrong". And you'd think that with HDMI all transfer would be pixel-perfect, but no, because as this review has shown, manufacturers can include "enhancements" too.

So, without experience with HD60s, I have no idea if it would be better or worse. But at least I know the Ripsaw works, somewhat imperfectly, but it works. Will you be the brave soul who dive into uncharted territory to try to see if HD60s doesn't have dropped frames? Or will you play safe and get the Ripsaw / LGX?

*Trivia: USB stands for Universal Serial Bus, so when I say USB bus I'm actually saying Universal Serial Bus bus. But it also sounds strange if I say "the USB being held up", so I did whatever I did to get the idea across.

 

[Illusionist_85]

hoshii miki

 

[wwenze]

So I made myself into a case study. And this further stresses why technical competence is important, and the lack of which can result in incorrect conclusions, and why one should never give up troubleshooting.

So I kind of fixed the stuttering issue. Kind of, because not completely, and kind of kludge too. But here is the result:

The keyword is VirtualDub. Yupz, basically OBS was having trouble keeping up and dropping frames for no good reason. Frame-by-frame still shows dropped frames with VirtualDub, but happen much less often in comparison. (Only one found so far out of 4-digit frames checked.) And VirtualDub's handling of dropped frames is better - Instead of cloning the frame which causes the obvious stuttering, it just moves on to the next frame, with various options available for A/V resync. So you see slightly-increased speed for one frame which easily gets averaged out by the rest of the frames in the scene.

The issue? I don't have a way to measure latency right now, so I can't tell whether VirtualDub's improved performance is at the expense of extreme latency. That being said, the preview in VirtualDub seems to be equivalent to OBS, and much smoother.

So, pretty much proved that nearly all the issues were software related. And that's important, because if I had been using HD60s, more likely than not I would have encountered the same issues, and reached the same incorrect conclusion.

And these observations seem to go in line with people saying the HD60s is okay with the bundled software but stutters with OBS.

So where can I go from here? I can try to make it work better with VirtualDub, but VirtualDub is pretty dated by today's standards - Support for only VFW codecs, which means no NVENC, and even H.264 requires a workaround to be able to be outputted into AVI which I suspect is causing audio to be off by a static 500ms (I corrected it for the video above). And generally just less convenient than OBS. I can try to make OBS work, although I have tried all settings I managed to find. I can try harder. Or I can find other software. None of these solutions is going to be easy, but video capture has never been easy since the analogue days.

So now that this thing is working, I can talk about the price/value. The refurbished Razer Ripsaw is going for around USD$100 in the USA right now. You'll most likely need a forwarder, or you can buy from Amazon which charges USD$12 for the shipping, the total cost is still much below the Elgato HD60s. You may even be able to find $15 off $75 eBay promos to further reduce the price. The only time I have seen Elgato HD60s come close is last Black Friday, where it sold for USD$109. Not sure if that price allowed international shipping. (Often, such promo prices are limited to sales in the USA.) And Amazon always charges tax too for sales in the USA. So even with a once-in-a-bluemoon price, the HD60s is still slightly more expensive than the Ripsaw's always-available price.

Not to mention the Ripsaw / LGX comes with analogue inputs which you're going to need for PS3 and Xbox 360 unless you... erm... do ...something.

So overall? Well I still have no idea whether the HD60s will be able to give me perfect capture be it using the orthodox method or the ghetto method, but if you can find it again at USD$109, it's worth a shot. But at always-available prices, the Razer Ripsaw provides great value, especially now that we know virtually-perfect capture is possible with the Ripsaw (albeit ghetto) while there are still much unknowns about the HD60s.

 

[wwenze]

And the review continues

And so the most-asked question (at least by me), how long is the latency? Can it replace a PCI-E capture card?

Latency is...

3 frames @ 60fps (50ms)

Which is actually faster than the AverMedia H727 PCI-E by one frame

Very impressive. I recorded from both capture cards (card?) at the same time via a splitter. Here you can see consistent screen tearing as a result of the Ripsaw being ahead by one frame.

But this video also shows the dropped frames issue with Ripsaw. Pardon some of the dropped frames that are actually caused by my computer (identifiable by both capture cards dropping frames) - OBS having trouble keeping up with scaling/cropping/displaying two video capture devices at the same time while still encoding via x264. But in majority of the cases, only the Ripsaw is dropping frames while the H727 isn't, hence showing the Ripsaw as the cause.

I've tried reinstalling Windows, tried different USB3 ports, gave it its own power supply via a powered USB hub, sniffed the USB packet traffic and found no bandwidth issues or dropped packets. I have no idea what causes this. The final possible hardware cause I can think of is due to me using H110 chipset which uses DMI 2.0 connection between CPU and PCH, as opposed to DMI 3.0 used by other Skylake chipsets as well as newer chipsets. Or just generic bad quality of the chipset or motherboard.

Software may play a part, because every time I restart OBS the problem goes away for a while, and gets worse as time goes on. That said, H727 isn't affected this badly (Sometimes OBS does go apesh*t by itself), so there must be some kind of interaction between Ripsaw, OBS, and my system.

Although bottom line, it still gives a consistent 30fps at least, due to the way it drops the frames. Worst case I've observed is one dropped frame followed by 3 good frames. It's more like 50+fps most of the time and 45fps during the really bad periods. But the maximum time between frame is still equivalent to 30fps. And when you are seeing 60fps most of the time and you get dropped frames, it gets irritating.

Component input with a PS3

Get some good speakers there's some epic BGM coming up courtesy of Arc System Works.

Playing via OBS's preview window. Would be impossible with cards that compress the video with H.264 before sending it over, like Elagto HD60 for example.

The Ripsaw markets itself as supporting PS3. But PS3 HDMI has HDCP. So the Ripsaw uses component connection instead. It even comes with a cable that directly connects to the PS3's AV out instead, which is a nice touch.

I somehow remember component cable to be capable of better, sharper pictures, but in this case there seems to be some detail lost via colorspace compression. But oh well, this is what it is. I don't have other sources, nor other cables to connect to my H727 with. There isn't another USB3.0 low-latency capture card with component input anyway, apart from LGX, which is the same thing, and the U3, which is like the earlier version of the same thing.

But anyway, it is always better to capture via HDMI, and this is where the Ripsaw falls short. But you're not supposed to be able to capture HDCP-protected video. At least officially, hence that's why Razer bundled component cables. But in reality, there are cards that can record HDCP, mostly from China.

So... verdict?

- 50ms latency is really impressive
- Dropped frames, not so impressive
---Strangely I have not seen anyone else reporting similar symptoms with their Ripsaw or LGX. Could be my system. Could be people testing with non-60fps games. Could be people not testing long enough.
- No HDCP
- Has analog inputs, useful for your PS3 if you want to use this method
- Is just a shittier version of AverMedia LGX. Although it does look nicer and is smaller, so it's also a better version...?

The retail price is a whopping SGD$300... which makes it hard to recommend. But things aren't that straightfoward - although it is a shittier version of LGX and if you can find the LGX selling for cheaper, then just go for the LGX. But we can't find LGX here. And the alternative - the Elgato HD60 S, is also around the same price when it was selling and has gone out of stock from the shops. And I'm not sure whether it has its share of problems or not.

But there is one unit selling for SGD$130... and at that price... even cards from taobao cost more (SGD$130 = RMB$633), and still can't do 1080p60. You can also buy it from the USA, but you would need to add forwarder fees on top of that too, plus tax if applicable in the state of your US address. EDIT: Seems like the offer is over / stocks are out already.