The YuzukiLOHCC PRO Is a Low-Cost, Highly-Capable USB HDMI Capture Card with Loop Output
Requiring under $10 in parts, this 4K-capable gadget packs in the features — and is made available under a permissive open hardware license.
Open hardware creator Yuzuki Tsuru has released a compact board designed to offer HDMI video capture via USB at as low a cost as possible — while still supporting a pass-through output, so the signal can be split out to an external monitor during capture: the YuzukiLOHCC PRO.
"[The] Yuzuki Loop Out HDMI Capture Card PRO [YuzukiLOHCC PRO is a] low-cost USB3.2 Gen. 1 HDMI-USB video acquisition [board] with loop out — [a] loop-out HDMI capture card," Tsuru explains of the permissively-licensed gadget. "[It's] based on [the MacroSilicon] MS2130 and MS9332 + MS8003."
Despite its low cost target and surprisingly small footprint, the capture card offers impressive functionality: a USB Type-C port powers the board and provides a high-speed USB 3.2 Gen. 1 connection to a host PC, while the HDMI capture hardware grabs the signals present on the input HDMI port and sends them to the host in configurable YUV422 or MJPEG modes — while also sending the input signal out unmodified to an output port for an external display.
The board's design offers support for 4K×2K resolution HDMI video at 30Hz, or the same resolution HDMI 2.0 YCbCr420 at 60Hz, with 10-, 12-, 16-bit deep color support on the loop output. On the capture side, the card snags both video and audio and exposes itself as a UVC 1.0 device — meaning it's fully supported in Linux, macOS, Windows 7 and higher, Android, and other operating systems in software including OBS Studio, FFmpeg, and most webcam-capable packages.
The board's design is available on Tsuru's GitHub repository under the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2 - Permissive license variant, though its creator warns that "I couldn't find a public version of the MS8003 code" — meaning those looking to build their own will need to pick up pre-programmed chips. Even then, the total cost of the parts required should come out at under $10.