This is Epiphan’s new capture device - the AV. io 4K. From the outside, this is much of the same as their previous AV. io HD - the same super-durable metal case, now with a nicer blue color accent, and a HDMI port in place of the DVI port. But the AV. io 4K is quite a bit heavier. Internally, the 4K now has a giant heat sink covering the entire PCB with a tiny little fan on it, whereas the HD didn’t have either.
The fan vents air out near the HDMI port, but is totally silent. I only thought to check for it because I could feel a faint hint of vibration and air movement,but never once heard it. Both units seem to reach equal temperatures under load - warmer than room temperature,but never hot. This new capture card is pretty sweet. It’s driver-less, works with Windows, Mac, and Linux and supports higher resolution sand frame rates over USB 3. 0 or lower sizes over USB 2. 0, and does all of the video processing on the device itself - saving your PC from doing any extra leg work for capture.
You may have notice that it’s specifically called the AV. io “4K” - that’s because it can now record footage up to 4K resolution at up to 30 FPS!This makes it the perfect card to get if you’re capturing from 4K cameras or only shooting 1080p now, but plan to upgrade later. It doesn’t do 4K60, but no one really needs that just yet. 4K30 is perfectly fine in the majority of situations.
I did run into a problem where it would max out at 20 FPS at 4K - as it has to be in aspecific color space for full 30 FPS and I just couldn’t get it working. But it turns out that was a common issue and they quickly popped out a firmware update that fixed things right up. This card is super easy to set up in OBS, or your favorite streaming program, and takes most of the load off of your CPU for recording and streaming.
It’s so lightweight that I was able to do a full 720p, 60FPS stream from my Linux laptop- which I can’t even get to record its own screen without lagging! Pretty neat. The quality is great, as always - given that you have full, uncompressed access to thevideo feed. You can set whatever compression you want, or pull a lossless recording out of it, ifyou’re so inclined. It also handles any down scaling, up scaling, frame rate changes, or de-interlacing you throw at it.
This is great for those looking to record or stream oddball resolutions - such as from mobile devices - as most “gaming” capture cards won’t handle non-standard resolutions. This will!Plus, you can still feed it a full 4k 60 fps signal and have it just take a 30 FPS feed to record. No problem. It’s small, lightweight, and works with just about anything.
What more do you need?My only real complaint is that it can’t do 1440p 60fps. Once you get past 1080p, you’re stuck with only 30 FPS. But this thing is great at 1080p60, too!And you don’t have to do any weird HDMI-DVI conversions. You will need a HDMI splitter or to clone a secondary output from your graphics card,however, as there isn’t any pass-through. For 400 bucks, I can confidently say that this is probably the best capture card you can currently get for the price range. If you need something insanely flexible, you can’t go wrong with this bad boy. I hope you enjoyed my review of the AV. io 4k.
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