Elk to modern display (hdmi) my cheap solution = TV / capture card

[4-3is4-me]

Having picked up an Electron only recently (and then a second comes shortly after..) I was looking at the ways to use it on the modern hdmi monitor I have set up at my desk. I have no space for a second screen so a small TV is out of the question.

The generally adopted HDMI options are these I think:

RGB to rgbScart converter box to HDMI
RGBTOHDMI

My issue is that both these HDMI options are around £50, when I have no idea how much I will be playing with this it's alot for me just to get started. The route I have found is a little different so I thought I would share here. I have a old box pc set up with linux hooked up via a kvm switch to my monitor. I decided I would be able to use the composite on a TV/capture card as input. So I bought the cheapest PCI TV card on ebay, a Pinnacle DVB at £5.50 delivered which has RF, composite and S-Video inputs. If I say so myself, it works great with no noticable latency (so far)!

Here's the set up using the composite:
install v4l-utils and mpv, I did both through the distro package manager.
https://www.linuxtv.org/
https://mpv.io/
set the TV / capture card input to the composite with

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v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 -i 2

start the stream with

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mpv av://v4l2:/dev/video0 --profile=low-latency --untimed --osc=no --vf=format=fmt=gray

mpv has a huge number of options and configuration https://mpv.io/manual/stable/. Thankfully they have a low-latency profile which works great. The --osc=no is to remove the on screen controls (play, stop etc) and as I have not done a colour composite mod yet --vf=format=fmt=gray sets a filter for grey scale.

There are keyboard shortcuts such as 'f' to toggle full screen and 's' to take a screen shot.

As a bonus, capture is also possible! To save to 'myvideocapture.mkv' use:

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mpv --stream-record=./myvideocapture.mkv av://v4l2:/dev/video0 --profile=low-latency --untimed --vf=format=fmt=gray --osc=no

So far this has worked great for me, I do have to have the box pc on, but that is okay. I did try with VLC and OBS on default settings but the latency was terrible, while I think it would be possible to improve the latency in both, using mpv was the easiest solution.

I'm thinking of trying the colour composite mod and experimenting with s-video as well...