Update: It's official—AVerMedia today launched the Live Gamer Duo, an internal PCIe capture card with two HDMI inputs, priced at $250. In a follow-up tweet, AVerMedia said its initial stock sold out just two hours after launch. Impressive, seemingly, though we don't know how many units were made available.
"The Live Gamer Duo (LGD) is a dual HDMI capture card that enables you to passthrough and play in 4K HDR while simultaneously recording your video from two separate feeds in uncompressed Full HD. It’s not limited to 4K HDR as you can also pass-through high refresh rates of up to 240Hz in Full HD."
AVerMedia is selling the Live Gamer Duo directly on its website, and says it is working with Amazon to get it listed there "ASAP" as well.
This is an intriguing entry in the capture card space, but how does it fare? Stay tuned—we're shooting to have a review posted by the end of the week, or next week by the latest.
Original story:
AVerMedia is getting ready to announce another internal PCIe capture card, and it is strongly suggested (though not outright confirmed) it will sport two inputs instead of one.
The company posted a short teaser clip on Twitter that offers shadowy glimpses of the card installed in a PC. However, AVerMedia is careful to avoid showing the port selection—I've gone through it frame-by-frame and there is nary one to be found that depicts the ports.
Here's the teaser anyway:
S👀N pic.twitter.com/44lPua2JMlAugust 11, 2020
In response to someone asking, "Affordable double HDMI in?", AVerMedia liked the tweet and responded, "You'll see, soon!"
AVerMedia also responded to a tweet pointing out how the company managed to "cheekily hide the ports."
"Oh, you noticed?!" AVerMedia said.
The last bit of evidence is found by following a link in the teaser to sign up for updates on the new card: "It's time to/two level up. Haven't we said before that two is better than one?"
There's little else this could be, other than a capture card with two inputs. They will mostly likely both be HDMI inputs, though it is conceivable one could be HDMI and the other a DisplayPort input. I'm betting on the former.
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What's the point of having two inputs? There are a couple of scenarios. One is to feed a game stream into one of the ports and a webcam stream through the other. You could also leverage a dual input capture card for multiple gaming systems, like a PC and console.
AVerMedia's timing is likely strategic, with Sony and Microsoft getting ready to release next-gen consoles (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, respectively). For gamers who play and stream on both PC and console, it would be convenient to plug them into their own inputs, rather than switching back and forth.
In any event, all we know for sure is that this will be a PCIe card, and that it is coming "soon."
