PS5 Capture Card 2026: 4K60 in OBS, 12 Steps, 40 Min

Somewhere, right now, a person is typing "PS5 capture card black screen" into a search box, and the fix is a single toggle buried three menus deep that Sony would prefer you never locate. This tutorial ends that specific suffering, along with roughly nine of its relatives. Budget forty minutes, a screwdriver's worth of patience, and one strong opinion about bitrate.

Here is the sentence that belongs on the box and is not printed there: the PlayStation 5 is not a capture card. It records clips to its own SSD when you tap Create, yes, but it will not hand a clean, uncompressed feed to a PC for you to composite and encode in OBS. That job belongs to external silicon: an AVerMedia, an Elgato, a NearStream, a slab of HDMI-to-USB hardware sitting between the console and your computer. GamesRadar spent 2026 crowning the AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra 2.1 as the best overall card of the year, citing its ability to record up to 4K144 footage, and we will get to why. First, the theory nobody reads.

What follows is the entire path, in order: prerequisites with real version numbers, how to choose a card without being lied to by a spec sheet, the HDCP execution, twelve wiring-and-software steps with the reasoning behind each, an OBS encoder walkthrough, the seven pitfalls that quietly ruin footage, a troubleshooting table worth bookmarking, advanced VRR and HDR handling, and a complete working configuration you can copy at the bottom. If you already bought a USB 2.0 card, skip ahead to the part where I explain why that was a mistake, then arrange the return.

Why the PS5 Isn't a Capture Card

Before you spend a cent, understand what the console actually does and does not do at the video-output layer. Half the confusion in every capture-card thread comes from people who never internalized this section, and they pay for it in refunds.

The built-in recorder is a decoy

The PS5's Create button is genuinely useful and genuinely narrow. It captures to internal storage using the console's own compression, on the console's own schedule, in a format tuned for sharing to the PlayStation ecosystem rather than for editing or live production. There is no live output stream to a second machine, no OBS source, no way to overlay a webcam, alerts, or a chat box without a PC in the loop. Sony's built-in Broadcast feature will push directly to Twitch or YouTube, but it hands you a locked, low-ceiling encoder with no scene control, no local recording master, and none of the compositing that separates a stream from a screen-share. If your entire ambition is a fifteen-second clip of a clutch round posted to a phone, the internal recorder is fine and you may close this tab. If you want to produce — to switch scenes, layer sources, hit a platform at a bitrate you control, and keep an edit-quality local file — the internal recorder is a decoy, and the real work happens on hardware Sony did not sell you.

Passthrough versus capture: the distinction that costs $60

Every capture card advertises two sets of numbers, and buyers who skim purchase on the wrong one. Passthrough is the signal the card forwards to your television or monitor so you can play with no added latency. Capture is the signal the card digitizes and streams over USB to your PC. These are almost never equal. The AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra 2.1 passes HDR or VRR through to your display at up to 4K60, 2K144, or 1080p240 — full-fat, tear-free — while it captures at 4K60 or 2K144, per the 2026 tier lists. The box shouts the passthrough number because it is the bigger one. Your recording lives on the capture number. Buy on the wrong figure and you have paid flagship money for a feed that tops out below what you pictured. Every card in this guide gets read twice for exactly this reason.

When you actually need external silicon

You need a card the moment you want a real production pipeline: two-monitor play, overlays, a local 4K master, or a controlled stream bitrate. You do not need one if you are content with a soft, latency-taxed feed pulled off the console over Wi-Fi. If you fall in the second camp and own no capture hardware yet, our PS Remote Play walkthrough gets you broadcasting at 1080p with zero extra gear, at the cost of input lag and image fidelity a wired card would never tolerate. For anything competitive, cinematic, or archival, the wire wins. The rest of this tutorial assumes you have chosen the wire.

Prerequisites: Hardware and Software

Gather everything below before you touch a single menu. Half of all failed setups are not misconfigurations; they are a missing cable spec or a USB port that was never fast enough. Confirm the manifest first.

The hardware manifest

You need six things and no fewer. One: a PlayStation 5 (disc, Digital, Slim, or Pro — the output stage is identical). Two: an external capture card matched to your capture target, chosen in the next section. Three: a host PC with a hardware video encoder — practically, an NVIDIA RTX card with NVENC, an AMD RDNA card with AMF, or an Intel Arc or recent iGPU with Quick Sync; encoding 4K60 on a CPU alone with x264 is a punishment, not a plan. Four: two certified HDMI cables. Five: a display for the passthrough view. Six: a genuine USB 3.0 or 3.1 port on the PC, not a hub, not a front-panel afterthought wired to a USB 2.0 header. That last item sinks more setups than any software bug.

The software stack (versions)

Install, in this order: the capture card's current driver and its latest firmware from the vendor's utility; your GPU's current studio or game-ready driver; and OBS Studio 31, which is the 2026 baseline and the version this guide's dialog paths assume. If you are migrating from Twitch's abandoned first-party tool, our teardown on why OBS Studio 31 replaced Twitch Studio covers the encoder and scene-collection basics you will lean on here. On Linux, add v4l-utils and ffmpeg for device enumeration and a headless recording fallback. Keep OBS current — capture-device handling, AV1 output, and VRR-source tolerance all improved across the 31.x line, and the OBS team documents every change in the official OBS Studio repository.

The one cable spec nobody checks

An HDMI cable has a bandwidth class printed nowhere obvious, and the wrong one fails silently by downshifting your resolution or dropping HDR rather than showing an error. For 4K60 you need at minimum a certified Premium High Speed cable (18 Gbps). For 4K120 passthrough on the PS5's HDMI 2.1 output you need a certified Ultra High Speed cable (48 Gbps). The five-dollar cable in the drawer may be 10.2 Gbps, which caps you at 4K30 or 1080p and will make you blame the card. Buy certified, or spend an evening chasing a fault that was always the wire.

Picking the Card: 2026 Tier List

The 2026 field is crowded and mostly competent; the differences are capture ceiling, passthrough features, interface bandwidth, and price. IGN's expert roundup names the EVGA XR1 Pro, AVerMedia GC513, Elgato HD60 X, AVerMedia Mini, and Asus TUF CU4K30 as its seamless-with-PS5 picks. Here is how they actually stack up.

The flagship: AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra 2.1

Priced around $210, this is the card GamesRadar rates best overall for 2026, and the number it earns its keep on is 4K144 recording headroom. Note the deadpan detail: the "2.1" in the name is not the HDMI version — the input is HDMI 2.0. What you get is passthrough of HDR or VRR up to 4K60, 2K144, or 1080p240, with capture at 4K60 or 2K144. Two hundred and ten dollars is steep, and the tier lists say so plainly, but it is the justified steep: gameplay at 4K60, 2K144, or 1080p240 and masters at 4K60 or 2K144 is the widest envelope on this page. If you cannot decide, this is the safe over-buy.

The streamer's default: Elgato HD60 X

The Elgato HD60 X is the current external flagship, built to replace the older HD60 S+. It records 4K30 or 1080p60, passes 4K60 HDR straight through, and — the reason it lives in so many setups — supports VRR to stop screen tearing on PS5 and Xbox Series X, with the ultra-low latency Twitch streamers demand at a standard 1080p60. It is not the card for 4K60 masters; it is the card for a tear-free play view and a rock-solid 1080p60 broadcast, which is what most streamers actually ship. Alongside it, the NearStream Capture Card targets the other extreme: true 4K60 or 1080p120 recording over USB-C 3.1 with True HDR10 and premium low latency, aimed squarely at creators cutting 4K60 YouTube uploads.

Budget, portable, and the rest of the field

A budget-friendly alternative runs about $147 and still lets you play at 4K60 or 2K144 while capturing at 1440p60 or 4K30 — a sane first card. The Asus TUF CU4K30 targets competitive FPS with gameplay at 4K60, 2K120, or 1080p240 and recording to match, at a balanced price; the "30" in the model name refers to something only Asus fully understands, because the 2026 tier list credits it with 4K60 capture. The AVerMedia Live Gamer Mini is the compact pick, capturing 4K30 or 1080p120 with gameplay up to 4K60. And for creators who record away from a desk, IGN singles out the AVerMedia GC513 Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus for seamless PS5 integration and standalone recording without surrendering 4K passthrough. The full expert field lives in IGN's best-capture-card-for-PS5 roundup.

The HDCP Problem, Solved

This is the single step that generates the most support threads, so it gets its own section. Get it wrong and OBS shows a black rectangle while your TV looks perfect. Get it right in ten seconds and never think about it again.

What HDCP is, and why Sony ships it on

HDCP is High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, a link-layer DRM handshake administered by Digital Content Protection LLC, originally an Intel design. Its entire job is to authenticate the connection between a source and a display and refuse to pass a clean signal to anything that looks like a recorder. The PS5 enables it by default because the console is also a Netflix, Disney+, and Blu-ray player, and those licensors demand the protection. Games are not the target of HDCP, but the toggle historically applied broadly. The Machine remembers the PS3, which welded HDCP on and made a generation of early streamers miserable; the PS4 and PS5 mercifully let you switch it off for gameplay. Your capture card is not a licensed HDCP sink, so with protection enabled it receives nothing usable — hence the black screen.

The exact toggle (System > HDMI)

Disabling HDCP is a first-party, supported setting. Navigate exactly here, then set your video output while you are in the menus:

Settings > System > HDMI
  Enable HDCP ............ [ OFF ]   <-- the toggle that matters
  HDCP Version ........... (greyed out once HDCP is off)

Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output
  Resolution ............. 2160p (Automatic)
  120 Hz Output .......... Automatic
  VRR .................... On   (only if the card passes VRR)
  ALLM ................... On
  HDR .................... Off  (for clean SDR capture; see Advanced)
  Deep Color Output ...... Automatic
  RGB Range .............. Limited  (match this value in OBS)

What legally changes when you flip it (nothing you'll notice)

Turning HDCP off does not jailbreak the console, void a warranty, or circumvent anything — it simply tells the console to output an unprotected signal, which is a setting Sony put there on purpose. The card is not "stripping" protection; it is receiving a stream that was never protected in the first place. That distinction is the whole legal ballgame: you are not defeating an access control under DMCA section 1201, you are using a sanctioned menu option. The only visible consequence is that HDCP-locked media apps — Netflix, Disney+, disc playback — will refuse to run and throw an error while the toggle is off. Games are unaffected. Flip it off to stream; flip it back on the day you want to watch a movie on the console. 2026 setup guides list this as the critical step for a reason.

The 12-Step Setup: Cable to 4K60

With a card chosen and HDCP understood, here is the full assembly. Wire it in the correct order, enumerate the device before you open OBS, and validate with a test recording. Each step carries its rationale, because a step you understand is a step you can debug.

The wiring order

Physical topology first. The console feeds the card's input; the card forwards to your display and simultaneously streams to the PC. Getting the two HDMI ends swapped is the second most common black-screen cause after HDCP.

[ PS5 ] --HDMI--> [ CARD: HDMI IN ]
                 [ CARD: HDMI OUT ] --HDMI--> [ TV / Monitor ]   (passthrough, ~0 ms)
                 [ CARD: USB 3.x  ] --USB----> [ PC / OBS ]       (capture feed)

The twelve steps

1. Read your PS5's output ceiling. Open Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output and note Resolution, 120 Hz, VRR, and HDR. Rationale: you cannot plan passthrough versus capture until you know exactly what the console is emitting.
2. Match the card to your capture target, not the passthrough number. Re-read the card's capture spec, not the big number on the box. Rationale: the packaging advertises the passthrough figure; your recording lives on the smaller capture figure, and confusing the two is the most expensive mistake in this hobby.
3. Verify PC bandwidth. Confirm a true USB 3.0 or 3.1 port — never a USB 2.0 port or an unpowered hub. Rationale: NearStream explicitly warns that USB 2.0 cards lack the bandwidth for uncompressed 1080p60 or 4K and produce blurry, blocky footage; the same physics applies to a fast card on a slow port.
4. Disable HDCP. Settings > System > HDMI > Enable HDCP, set to Off. Rationale: this is the single most common cause of a black capture; the card cannot accept a protected signal, and this toggle is the sanctioned fix.
5. Wire in the correct order. PS5 HDMI OUT to card HDMI IN; card HDMI OUT to your display; card USB to the PC. Rationale: passthrough gives you a zero-latency play view on the TV while the PC handles capture, so gameplay never suffers for the recording.
6. Use certified HDMI cables. Premium High Speed (18 Gbps) minimum, Ultra High Speed (48 Gbps) for 4K120 passthrough. Rationale: a sub-spec cable silently downshifts resolution or drops HDR with no error message, and you will blame the card for the cable's failure.
7. Install driver and firmware, then update GPU drivers. Run the vendor's utility, flash the newest firmware, refresh the GPU driver. Rationale: firmware updates are where vendors fix the VRR and HDR handshake and unlock the top capture modes; skipping this caps you below the spec you paid for.
8. Confirm the OS enumerates the device. Check Device Manager on Windows or v4l2-ctl on Linux before launching OBS (output examples below). Rationale: if the operating system cannot see the card, OBS never will either — this isolates a hardware or driver fault from a software one.
9. Add a Video Capture Device source in OBS Studio 31. Set resolution, FPS (59.94 or 60), and video format (NV12) to match the card's capture mode exactly. Rationale: a mismatched format yields green or magenta garbage or a silent downshift to a lower resolution.
10. Set the OBS canvas and output resolution. Choose a base canvas, an output (scaled) resolution, and the Lanczos downscale filter if you are scaling. Rationale: the canvas is not the source; leaving the wrong scale in place softens an otherwise sharp 4K feed into mush.
11. Pick a hardware encoder and rate control. NVENC or AV1 for the encode; CBR for a live stream, CQP for a local master. Rationale: 4K60 will bury a CPU running x264, so offload the work to the GPU and reserve headroom for the game.
12. Record a 60-second test and read the log. Capture a minute, then open the OBS log and check for skipped or dropped frames. Rationale: validate the entire chain in private before you go live in front of an audience that will screenshot your dropped frames.

Confirming the device enumerates (expected output)

Step 8 is where most silent failures surface. On Linux, list the device and its supported formats; you want to see the card's node and its full capture ladder, which confirms driver and USB bandwidth in one shot:

$ v4l2-ctl --list-devices
Live Gamer Ultra 2.1 (usb-0000:00:14.0-2):
    /dev/video0
    /dev/video1

$ v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --list-formats-ext
    Type: Video Capture
    : 'NV12' (Y/UV 4:2:0)
        Size: Discrete 3840x2160
            Interval: Discrete 0.017s (60.000 fps)
        Size: Discrete 2560x1440
            Interval: Discrete 0.007s (144.000 fps)
        Size: Discrete 1920x1080
            Interval: Discrete 0.004s (240.000 fps)

On Windows, ask ffmpeg to enumerate DirectShow devices and then probe the negotiated format. If the resolution and fps that come back match your PS5 output, the hardware chain is healthy and any remaining fault is purely inside OBS:

:: Windows: enumerate DirectShow devices
> ffmpeg -list_devices true -f dshow -i dummy
[dshow] "Live Gamer Ultra 2.1" (video)
[dshow] "Digital Audio Interface (Live Gamer Ultra 2.1)" (audio)

:: Confirm the negotiated capture format
> ffmpeg -f dshow -i video="Live Gamer Ultra 2.1"
  Stream #0:0: Video: rawvideo (NV12), nv12, 3840x2160, 60 fps, 60 tbr

OBS Config: Encoder and Bitrate

The capture is only as good as the encode. This is where 4K60 either lands crisp or collapses into a smear of dropped frames, and the settings that matter are fewer than the menus suggest.

Choosing an encoder (NVENC, AV1, x264)

Pick hardware every time you can. On an NVIDIA RTX card, use NVENC HEVC, or NVENC AV1 on RTX 40-series and newer — AV1 buys roughly a generation of efficiency, meaning cleaner 4K60 at a lower bitrate, which is exactly what a YouTube master wants. On AMD RDNA, use AMF, with AV1 on the newer parts; on Intel Arc or a recent iGPU, Quick Sync does the same job. Reserve x264 for the case where you have a spare CPU core budget and a specific reason, because at 4K60 the CPU path competes directly with the game for cycles. The whole point of a hardware encoder is that the capture, the encode, and the gameplay can coexist without any one starving the others.

Bitrate: stream CBR vs record CQP

Understand that a stream and a recording want opposite rate-control philosophies. A live stream to Twitch runs CBR — constant bitrate — at roughly 6000 Kbps for a practical 1080p60 broadcast, because the platform and the viewer's buffer want predictability, not peaks. A local recording runs CQP or CRF — constant quality — because a stored file has no buffer to protect and you want bits spent where the image is complex. For a 4K60 master, NVENC at CQ 18 to 23 produces an edit-grade file; YouTube's own published 4K60 recommendation sits in roughly the 45 to 68 Mbps range if you insist on targeting a bitrate instead. Do not stream a file-quality bitrate to Twitch and do not archive a stream-quality CBR file — they are different jobs.

# OBS Studio 31  -  Settings > Video
Base (Canvas) Resolution     3840 x 2160
Output (Scaled) Resolution   3840 x 2160     # 1920x1080 for a Twitch stream
Downscale Filter             Lanczos (36 samples, sharpened)
Common FPS Value             60

# Settings > Output (Advanced) > Recording
Type                         Standard
Recording Format             MKV (remux to MP4 afterward)
Encoder                      NVIDIA NVENC AV1 (HEVC on older GPUs)
Rate Control                 CQP
CQ Level                     20
Preset                       P5: Quality
Profile                      main
B-frames                     2
Psycho Visual Tuning         On

# Settings > Output (Advanced) > Streaming
Rate Control                 CBR
Bitrate                      6000 Kbps        # Twitch 1080p60 practical ceiling
Keyframe Interval            2 s

Color, range, and the gray-footage trap

Match three fields to the console: video format NV12, color space 709 for SDR, and color range set to Partial (Limited), because game consoles output limited-range HDMI by default and OBS defaulting to Full will crush your blacks and clip your highlights. If your footage looks washed-out and gray rather than crushed, you have the opposite problem — an HDR signal landing in an SDR pipeline — and that is a separate fix covered in the Advanced section. Set these once, correctly, and the image that reaches your encoder is the image the console sent.

Seven Pitfalls That Ruin Capture

These are the failures that survive a "working" setup — the ones where everything technically records but the result is wrong. Each has a one-line cause and a one-line fix.

The specification bait-and-switch

Pitfall 1 — Buying on the passthrough number. You saw 4K120 on the box and assumed your recording would be 4K120; it will not, because that is the passthrough spec and your capture ceiling is lower. Fix: buy and configure to the capture figure, always. Pitfall 2 — The USB 2.0 card or the USB 2.0 port. NearStream warns against USB 2.0 capture hardware outright in 2025 because it cannot carry uncompressed 1080p60 or 4K, and the footage comes out blocky and blurry; the same is true of a fast card plugged into a slow port or a cheap hub. Fix: USB 3.0 or 3.1, a rear port, direct to the board.

HDCP, HDR, and color sabotage

Pitfall 3 — HDCP left enabled. OBS shows a black frame while your TV looks flawless. Fix: Settings > System > HDMI > Enable HDCP, off. Pitfall 4 — HDR captured into an SDR pipeline. Everything records but the colors are flat, gray, and lifeless because a 10-bit HDR signal is being read as SDR. Fix: either turn HDR off on the PS5 for capture, or tone-map (Advanced section). Pitfall 5 — Color-range mismatch. Blacks are crushed to a single flat shadow or highlights blow out. Fix: set OBS color range to Partial to match the console's limited-range HDMI output.

Bandwidth and VRR gremlins

Pitfall 6 — VRR enabled on a card that cannot pass it. The play view flickers or flashes black at scene transitions because the card is choking on a variable-refresh signal it was never built to forward. Fix: enable VRR only on a card that explicitly passes it, such as the Elgato HD60 X or the Live Gamer Ultra 2.1; otherwise leave VRR off. Pitfall 7 — Canvas and scale mismatch, or the wrong cable. A pristine 4K source ends up soft because OBS is scaling it clumsily, or the whole feed silently caps at 1080p because a bargain HDMI cable cannot carry 18 Gbps. Fix: match the canvas to the source, use Lanczos when you must scale, and run certified cable.

Troubleshooting: The Signal Table

When it breaks, work top-down: is there any signal, is the signal ugly, or is the encode dropping it. The table below maps symptom to cause to fix; the sections around it explain how to read the evidence.

Black screens and no-signal faults

A black OBS preview with a healthy TV is almost always HDCP or a swapped HDMI end — check those two before anything else. If both the TV and OBS are black, suspect the cable order or a dead cable. And if the console itself is behaving strangely — refusing output modes it accepted yesterday, hanging on the video-output menu — the fault may be console-side rather than card-side, in which case our guide to clearing the PS5 cache in Safe Mode resolves a surprising share of phantom output faults in about eight minutes.

Ugly-but-present image faults

If you have an image but it is wrong, the culprit is color or bandwidth. Gray and washed-out means HDR-into-SDR. Crushed blacks means a range mismatch. Blocky and smeared means the USB bus is starved. Green or magenta blocks mean the video format in OBS does not match what the card outputs. None of these are the card dying; all are one setting away from correct.

Reading the OBS log like a diagnostician

OBS writes a log for every session (Help > Log Files), and it tells you precisely which stage failed. "Skipped frames due to encoding lag" means your encoder is overloaded — lower the resolution, ease the preset, or move to hardware. "Dropped frames due to network" means the stream, not the capture, is the bottleneck. A clean run reads 0.0% skipped, like this:

11:42:07.113: [DShow Device: 'Live Gamer Ultra 2.1'] settings updated:
11:42:07.113:     video device: Live Gamer Ultra 2.1
11:42:07.113:     resolution: 3840x2160
11:42:07.113:     fps: 60.00 (interval: 166666)
11:42:07.113:     format: NV12
11:42:07.113:     color range: Partial
11:42:07.113:     color space: 709
11:42:09.880: [NVENC] AV1 encode session created
11:47:31.204: Output 'adv_file_output': Total frames output: 19200
11:47:31.204: Output 'adv_file_output': Number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 0 (0.0%)

When the log alone does not settle it, the searchable OBS Studio Knowledge Base documents nearly every device and encoder error message by name.

Advanced: VRR, HDR, and Passthrough

Once the basics record clean, these are the refinements that separate a functional capture from a professional one. All three concern the signal's edge cases: dynamic range, variable refresh, and multi-machine topology.

HDR tone-mapping without the gray

Capture HDR only when the entire chain is HDR-aware from source to platform; otherwise a 10-bit signal read as SDR is the gray-footage disaster from the pitfalls list. The Elgato HD60 X, for instance, passes 4K60 HDR to your TV while recording at SDR-friendly resolutions, so your play view is HDR and your master is not — by design. When you must record an HDR source into an SDR deliverable, tone-map it. Apply a LUT filter in OBS, or run a one-pass ffmpeg tonemap for a headless master on Linux:

# Record from the card and tonemap HDR10 -> SDR Rec.709 in one pass (Linux)
ffmpeg -f v4l2 -input_format nv12 -video_size 3840x2160 -framerate 60 -i /dev/video0 -vf "zscale=transfer=linear:npl=100,tonemap=tonemap=hable:desat=0,zscale=primaries=bt709:transfer=bt709:matrix=bt709:range=tv,format=yuv420p" -c:v hevc_nvenc -preset p5 -rc constqp -qp 20 -c:a aac -b:a 256k ps5_master.mkv

VRR: pass it, don't capture it

Variable Refresh Rate belongs in the passthrough path, not the capture path. The Elgato HD60 X and AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra 2.1 forward VRR to your display, which is what keeps your play view tear-free on both the PS5 and, per IGN's list, the Xbox Series X — a fact worth remembering if you are weighing the two consoles for a capture rig, as our PS5 versus Xbox Series X breakdown does. The capture itself, though, stays locked to a fixed 60 frames, because a card digitizes at a constant rate and a variable-refresh source only confuses it. Pass VRR to the monitor for a smooth feel; capture at a fixed cadence for a stable file. Enabling VRR on a card that cannot pass it produces the black-flash fault, not smoother footage.

Two-PC, NDI, AV1 masters, and the replay buffer

For a serious setup, move the encode off the gaming PC entirely: send the capture over the LAN with NDI to a dedicated streaming machine, and the game never shares a cycle with the encoder. Enable OBS's Replay Buffer to dump the last thirty seconds to disk on a hotkey — the same instant-clip idea as the console's Create button, but at your bitrate and under your control. Record an AV1 master when your GPU supports it for markedly smaller 4K60 files at the same quality, and, if your hardware allows, run a CQP local master and a CBR stream simultaneously so you keep an edit-grade archive of a broadcast you already shipped.

The Complete Working Config

Everything above, condensed into one copy-ready reference. This is the configuration that produces a clean 4K60 master and a stable 1080p60 stream from a PS5 through a modern card into OBS Studio 31.

The PS5 side

HDCP off, output set to automatic 2160p, range limited, HDR off unless your whole chain is HDR-aware. These are the console-side values that let the card see a clean signal in the first place.

The card and OBS side

Input on HDMI 2.0, passthrough to your display, host over a direct USB 3.x port, firmware current. In OBS, the source format matches the card exactly and the encode is offloaded to the GPU.

The ffmpeg fallback (Linux)

Keep the verification commands handy — enumerate the device, probe the format, and read the log for a zero-skip run before you trust the rig live.

############  PS5  ############
Settings > System > HDMI
    Enable HDCP .............. OFF
Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output
    Resolution ............... 2160p (Automatic)
    120 Hz Output ............ Automatic
    VRR ...................... On (only if the card passes VRR)
    HDR ...................... Off for SDR capture / On for a full HDR chain
    RGB Range ................ Limited

############  CAPTURE CARD  ############
Input ......................  HDMI 2.0  (from PS5 HDMI OUT)
Passthrough ................  HDMI OUT to TV / monitor
Host .......................  USB 3.0 / 3.1 direct port (never a hub, never USB 2.0)
Firmware ...................  latest from the vendor utility

############  OBS STUDIO 31  ############
Source (Video Capture Device)
    Resolution/FPS Type ....  Custom
    Resolution .............  3840x2160
    FPS ....................  60
    Video Format ...........  NV12
    Color Space ............  709
    Color Range ............  Partial (Limited)
Video
    Base Canvas ............  3840x2160
    Output Scaled ..........  3840x2160 (record) / 1920x1080 (stream)
    Downscale Filter .......  Lanczos
    FPS ....................  60
Output (Record)
    Encoder ................  NVENC AV1 / HEVC
    Rate Control ...........  CQP, CQ 20
    Preset .................  P5 Quality
Output (Stream)
    Encoder ................  NVENC / x264
    Rate Control ...........  CBR 6000 Kbps (Twitch 1080p60)
Audio
    Sample Rate ............  48 kHz
    PS5 Audio ..............  from the card's Digital Audio Interface
    Monitoring .............  Monitor Off (prevents echo)

############  VERIFY  ############
Linux:   v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --list-formats-ext
Windows: ffmpeg -list_devices true -f dshow -i dummy
Healthy: OBS log reports 0.0% skipped frames

That is the whole machine: a console that outputs cleanly, a card matched to its capture ceiling rather than its marketing, and an encoder that spends bits where they matter. The PS5 was never a capture card, and it never had to be — it just had to stop protecting a signal you are entitled to record. Flip the toggle, mind the passthrough-versus-capture line, keep the USB bus fast, and 4K60 is forty minutes away. Everything past that is taste.