Just when you think you’ve nailed your pet streaming setup, technology finds a way to laugh at you. This time, it was my attempt to connect a PS3 to my Elgato capture card. What followed was an hour-long spiral of frustration, mystery, and, surprisingly, a $10 solution.
It all started when I hooked up the PS3 to my capture card. Everything was fine… except the screen was black. No error message, no warning, just darkness. It turns out the culprit was HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection), which blocks the Elgato from recording protected signals. Naturally, Elgato doesn’t hint you what’s wrong. No message like, “Hey dummie, your screen is black, maybe check for HDCP.” Why on earth is the PS3 game signal protected in the first place? We’re talking about games here, not Avengers 17.
Then came the ultimate twist: how does a $10 HDMI splitter from AliExpress bypass HDCP? Somehow, this budget gadget can strip content protection from the signal, letting the Elgato do its job. The tech world is wild sometimes.
In the end, I got it to work, but not without wrestling with cables, settings, and my sanity for more than an hour. It’s also ugly as hell: your PS3 connected to a splitter connected to a capture card connected to a display (projector in my case). Yikes. Lesson learned neverthelesss: I literally duck-taped a cheap HDMI splitter on my streaming PC.
