"$d_SysMaint""video/HDMI capture notes, elgato.txt" www.BillHowell.ca 13Feb2021 08********08 13Feb2021 elgato HD60S video capture external USB, with separate audio mix-in (eg mic) needs USB 3.0, MacOS can I run in Linux? https://www.reddit.com/r/ElgatoGaming/comments/cehx58/i_actually_got_my_elgato_hd_running_in_linux_mint/ Posted byu/JayRayHawk 1 year ago I actually got my Elgato HD running in Linux Mint for the first time ever thanks to these alternate install instructions. I figured, maybe they can help someone else out too. (I realize this post is very lengthy, but I wanted to be thorough. The main video guide can be found here, full credit where it is due as this was not made by me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH73qpJ1dIs and that covers the "Installation Instructions" section in this post below. You may want to come back for the "Making Sure It Works, and Fixing Weird Display and Color Issues" section after that though, as there are some helpful troubleshooting tips based on my own trial-and-error experiences thus far beyond what the video covers.) Yesterday I was overjoyed to have actually gotten my Elgato HD up and running on Linux for the first time. I had tried using the guide here and the video tutorial here multiple times on two different machines running different versions of Ubuntu and Mint over the past year or two. Now I'm not a guru or wizard of a Linux user, so this probably seems amateur to some of you, but my every attempt at this in the past always seemed to run into problems I didn't know how to solve, despite following the directions precisely. But this time I tried an alternate set of directions that I found here in this video and was pleasantly shocked to discover it actually worked in my current Linux Mint 19.1 install. The process in these instructions is slightly different than what the official guide tells you to do, and it walks you through it on Mint which honestly might have made all the difference for me personally. The video explains each step in greater detail so if that works better for you by all means check it out instead, it's what I used. If you would prefer to read what to do, I've got it all detailed out in the Installation Instructions below. All credit goes to the respective creators of the video guide and the driver, I'm just repeating what they have already said and adding a bit of further clarification from my own experiences with the process here in the hopes it can help someone like it helped me. Note that this still only works for the original Elgato HD model capture device as far as I know. The HD60 and newer are not supported by the driver at all as far as I can tell from the driver documentation, so keep that in mind before giving this a try. Installation Instructions: Go ahead and plug in your Elgato HD right from the start here if you'd like. I hooked mine up around step 8 of this guide and that was fine too. You might want to get something running on it in the background for later so you can determine if it's working at the end of these directions. 2) Go here: https://github.com/tolga9009/elgato-gchd and find the green button on the right side where it says "Clone or Download", click that and choose "Download ZIP" 3) Go here: https://help.elgato.com/hc/en-us/articles/360027964072-Elgato-Game-Capture-HD-Software-Release-Notes-Windows and click where it says "Still using Windows 7? Download Game Capture 3.2 here." to download the older Windows version of the Game Capture software. (The version of this file that I am using is: GameCaptureSetup_3.20.33.1533_x64.msi in the event that matters for posterity.) 4) When you have both files downloaded, go to the download location and open "elgato-gchd-master.zip" and you want to extract the contents of that folder directly into your home folder. 5) Go to your home folder and you should see the folder "elgato-gchd-master" that you just extracted from the zip file. Rename this folder to "elgato-gchd" 6) Return to your download folder, and you're going to move the .msi file into a folder inside of the elgato-gchd folder named firmware_extract. So the file needs to be moved to: ~/elgato-gchd/firmware_extract/ 7) Once the .msi file has been moved into the above folder, right click the white space in this folder in Mint and choose "Open in Terminal" to open a new terminal pointing at this location. 8) Input the following into the terminal, then press Enter to run it: sudo apt-get install git dmg2img hfsprogs libusb-dev clang make build-essential NOTE: Press Enter to execute the code after each of these steps. 9) Input the following into the terminal: sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0* 10) Input the following into the terminal: sudo apt-get install p7zip-full 11) Input the following into the terminal: ./extract_firmware_windows 12) Input the following into the terminal: cd /usr/local/lib/ 13) Input the following into the terminal: sudo mkdir firmware 14) Input the following into the terminal: cd firmware/ 15) Input the following into the terminal: sudo tar xvf /home/yourcomputerusernamehere/elgato-gchd/firmware_extract/Firmware.tgz NOTE: Replace "yourcomputerusernamehere" with whatever your actual computer's user login name is. 16) Input the following into the terminal: cd ~/elgato-gchd/src/ 17) Input the following into the terminal: cmake .. NOTE: You need the space and two periods at the end after cmake. If you don't have cmake installed Linux Mint should prompt you and say that you can install it using the command it shows on screen. Do that and then input this command again after cmake is installed. 18) Input the following into the terminal: cd src/ 19) Input the following into the terminal: make NOTE: At this point, Mint threw 2 warnings for me, saying something about variables that were created but not being utilized or initialized or something like that. It doesn't seem to have had any detrimental consequences in my case though. Although it is not made perfectly clear in the video, at this point everything with the installation portion of things should be set up. The directions that follow are to make sure everything is working properly, so just go ahead and continue further to test your own setup using the below. Making Sure It Works, and Fixing Weird Display and Color Issues: From here I am going to describe the steps you'll need to take every time you go to use the Elgato HD, as well as some things that I ran into personally that needed some fiddling to get working right. This also covers the last part of the video's instructions but in greater detail. For me in order to get this to work, I need to use both VLC to display the footage from the Elgato, and OBS to capture it while VLC displays it. There may be other simpler/better ways to go about it that I am just unaware of, but for me this combination works and that's all I was really after at the end of the day. If you're also using Linux Mint, VLC is usually installed by default, but if not you can find both VLC and OBS via the built in Software Manager. First, you have to open the terminal (CTRL+ALT+T is the keyboard shortcut by default) and you need to keep it open the whole time you are using the Elgato HD. 2) Input the following into the terminal, then press Enter: cd ~/elgato-gchd/src/src 3) This step's settings will depend on what you're trying to record from. In the video it tells you to use: sudo ./gchd -ir 1080 and at first that's what I tried it with too, and saw a very pink, but technically functioning output on my TV. At this point in the terminal it will say something like "waiting for the user to open the file" that it created, and you'll do that in VLC (more on that in the next step.) I ended up having to input more specific instructions in the terminal at this point to get it working properly without the very pink image, and I explain some of those in the examples below. If you go back here https://github.com/tolga9009/elgato-gchd and scroll down to the "Usage" section of the instructions you will see the different kinds of parameters you can input here and what they mean. If your signal is working and you can see stuff on the screen but you get an overly pink or green image or the video looks like it is split in half and swapped around, or anything else that looks wrong or off to you, you'll want to try different settings during this step to find the one that works best for the particular device you are recording from. For example, testing with the Nintendo e-shop download version of Xenoblade Chronicles from the Wii on my Wii U, I had to put the following into the terminal in order to get it to look right: sudo ./gchd -ir 720 -input hdmi -color-space yuv as the default RGB color settings left me with a shockingly pink hued image on both my TV and the footage in VLC, and it needed to use the YUV color settings instead. Quite contrary to the above example however, for footage to look right coming from my Nintendo Switch it needed to use the RGB color space setting (it looked excessively green with YUV) and it didn't look right at all with the 720 input resolution setting either (the screen was split in half horizontally and swapped around so the bottom was at the top and the top was at the bottom... very unexpected) so I ended up having to use these settings instead: sudo ./gchd -ir 1080 -or 720 -input hdmi -color-space rgb A personal note here: I don't have any hardware that actually handles 1080p properly so that's why I set the output resolution to 720 in the above examples. My computer monitor uses 900p and my old 32" TV can only handle 720p/1080i so I saw no real need to focus on 1080 with my personal setup. Your ideal settings may vary to the above because of this and what you're trying to accomplish with your own device, but these are just some examples of the different kinds of things that you might need to try to get it working in the best way for you. 4) Next, to get the video footage appearing on your computer, you'll want to open VLC, and choose Media > Open File from the menu. 5) Navigate to /tmp and open the gchd.ts file (if you don't see it listed there in the tmp folder, type the file name into the file name box manually and it should open it that way) If you're having trouble finding the tmp folder, you should be able to get there using the navigation pane to the left side of the Open File window in VLC, click where it says "Computer", then choose the "/" folder that appears in the main part of the window, and you should see the tmp folder from there. The gchd.ts file that running the command in the previous steps created for you should be inside that folder, even if it isn't appearing there in the list of files necessarily. Sometimes VLC will hang up at this part, seemingly endlessly "searching" for the video source. If that happens I just close VLC, go back to the terminal window and use CTRL+C in the terminal to send the stop signal to the driver, and once it errors out and puts you back on the terminal input prompt, I just start from the top of this section of the guide and try again. It usually works on the second try if it didn't work the first time. If it hangs in the terminal too and never fully stops, the only way I've found to get it to work again is just unplug the Elgato's USB cable from the computer, wait a few seconds, and then plug it back in and try again from the beginning. Not the most elegant or desirable solution to the problem perhaps, but it seems to be a functional one as far as I can tell.) 6) When the video feed appears in VLC, if it is looking good to you, then you'll want to open OBS next. If it's not looking right, you may have to go back to the terminal, press CTRL+C to send the driver a stop signal, close VLC for good measure, and start over again from the top of this section of the guide trying different resolution or color settings like I mentioned in my examples in step 3 above. 7) In OBS I have had good results so far using "Window Capture" as the recording source, just double click on that and make sure you select the VLC window as the one it records from, as it defaults to the desktop instead. You'll want to set up your OBS settings to be however you prefer them for output resolutions and compression and things of that nature for your recorded videos. I'll leave that up to you to determine for your own needs. One problem I was having at first on my machine was the desktop background was randomly flashing in strange streaks near the top of the screen and showing that instead of the video feed in the resulting recording. It sometimes still happens and I'm not 100% sure what the deal is with that, might be something specific to my video card or display driver perhaps, but I found that in my case to drastically reduce or even eliminate this effect, I just have to minimize all possible open windows besides VLC, click the "Start Recording" button in OBS, minimize even the OBS window after that, and put VLC into fullscreen view as the only visible window on my machine while recording. I haven't tested this fully enough yet to know for sure if it will always eliminate that issue or not, but it seems to help a good deal and I recorded a half hour worth of footage last night from my Switch without that issue appearing at all when I made sure to minimize everything first. Before that I had 3 minutes of footage and it was plagued with the visual errors and looked pretty terrible with all the other windows still open in the background, so it seems promising at least. You may not have this issue at all on your setup of course, but if you do, try minimizing everything and making VLC fullscreen and see if that helps any. 8) When you are finished recording, close OBS and VLC, go back to the terminal and press CTRL+C to send the stop signal to the driver, and that should be all you have to do. It'll probably show an error at the end of some variety in the terminal as it finishes up but that doesn't seem to hurt anything as far as I can see so far anyway. If it doesn't stop after about 5-10 seconds and seems to just hang after saying that it sent the stop signal, you may need to just unplug the Elgato from the computer to get it to stop all the way. I should also note here that there is a noticeable lag between the version that I see as I'm playing on my TV and the version that appears in VLC, somewhere in the range of about 1-2 seconds between what it shows on the TV and what appears in VLC if I had to guess off the top of my head. This was also the case using the official software on Windows for me so I don't think it's exclusive to Linux or anything, but it feels like an ever so slightly longer delay perhaps than it was on Windows, but that could just be my imagination too. Anyway it's worth noting because you'll want to take that difference between the two sets of video into consideration as you play and record. Finally it's also worth noting that I haven't tried streaming with it, because my internet is not good enough to be able to handle streaming reliably, so I've strictly done recording with OBS and not anything on the streaming side. My apologies that I can't be of further service to those looking to also stream with their Elgato HD. Anything that isn't covered by this lengthy post, well I don't think I have the knowledge or the know-how to help you, so if you run into issues that I didn't, hopefully a more skilled Linux user out there can point you in the right direction to getting them resolved. It's only thanks to the efforts of tolga9009 for creating the linux version of the driver and the detailed instructions for their use, and to youtube channel freelanceTEK.com for posting the slightly alternate video instructions specific to Linux Mint up on youtube that I was able to get this working at all to be honest. I'm incredibly appreciative as it was one of the last regrets I would have had to leave behind from the Windows OS side of things that now I don't have to leave behind at all, and I hope that someone out there somewhere is able to use all this to find similar success with getting their Elgato HD up and running nicely for video capture, where prior attempts had failed, just like what happened for me. Best of luck to you, and thanks for your time! 4 comments 100% Upvoted User avataru/sharesight·promoted Do you know how your TFSA, RRSP or RRIF investments are doing? Sharesight calculates your portfolio performance, automatically tracks your dividends, and lets you track global stocks and over 38,000 Canadian mutual funds. Sign up - Free. Sharesight.com/ca/ Sign Up This thread is archived New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast Sort by User avatar level 1 CaptChair 1 year ago May I ask, what are the benefits of this? 2 User avatar level 2 JayRayHawk 1 year ago I'm not sure I understand what you are asking exactly, benefits in relation to whom or what, but I'll try to answer generally. The benefit to me was stated rather clearly from the title of this post. To everyone else who sees this, it's going to vary from person to person whether they find anything of value here to them or not. Perhaps it is of little to no benefit to most. If you felt it added nothing of value for you, that's fine. You're welcome to ignore it or otherwise do as you please. Perhaps also there are people who can make use of this information having not found it explained in such a way previously, or who followed other guides but were still left frustrated with questions that went unanswered beyond the resources they had at their disposal. I cannot guess specifically what benefit there is, if any, to any one person who happens across what I've written up here today. Perhaps they find something useful, perhaps not, but either way I hope I have been able to answer your question satisfactorily. 1 Continue this thread More posts from the ElgatoGaming community Continue browsing in r/ElgatoGaming # enddoc