I have both the Avermedia C027 / H727 and the StarTech PEXHDCAP. I like the latter much more, it’s similar to the C127 you linked but has better drivers and, to be honest, Avermedia support is pretty meh. After I and TheThrillness contacted them for many weeks explaining and demonstrating how bad component looks on these cards, they managed to give us new beta drivers with which it was even worse.
Here is a comparison:
Avermedia H727 with Gamecube 480p YPbPr (“component”) video input:
Yuan SC-500 = StarTech PEXHDCAP with Gamecube 480p YPbPr:
Yuan SC-500 = StarTech PEXHDCAP with Gamecube 480p RGBHV:
(It actually looks slightly better now, this is an old screenshot from when I mistakenly set the contrast level slightly too high)
StarTech is a reseller of all kinds of OEM electronics. The PEXHDCAP is a rebrand of the taiwanese Yuan SC-500N1. Yuan cards are the gold standard in the high-definition livestreaming / gameplay recording community. At least if you want to spend less than 1000$.
The SC-500 is somewhat limited in that it cannot capture 1080p60, but neither can the Avermedia C127. (C127’s Amazon listing title is misleading and makes one think it can, but in the description they state that you can feed it 1080p60, but only 1080p30 will be captured.)
If you only want to capture / stream Melee, PM and the likes, it doesn’t matter, though. If you also want to do Smash 4, 1080p60 would be perfect, but there are many problems with that (Flash player being bad and dropping frames on the viewers part and massive processing load for encoding, for example) so it’s not recommended at the moment.
If you still want to have the 1080p60 for being future-proof, I’d recommend the big sister of the SC-500, which is the SC-512. That card is about twice as much ($310-ish), handles 1080p60 easily and also has a powered passthrough daughterboard, so you don’t need any splitters.
I personally do the splitting with a USB-powered 4-way RGBHV (aka VGA) distribution amplifier (I paid 15€ for it) and a 4-way 3.5 mm audio distribution amplifier (paid 20€ for this one, also useful because you can hook up many speakers and even headphones for the players who want to have in-game sound for reaction cues, but headphones to be isolated from noise and cheering / booing).
These additional 35€ were much less than the additional 150€ I would have had to pay for buying the SC-512 instead of the SC-500. I also don’t need 1080p60 at all, and having composite and S-Video inputs is, imho, only useful if you are a traveling livestreamer who has to work with a myriad of consoles. If you only stream from the consoles you carry with yourself and have component or VGA cables for all of them, this feature of the SC-512 is unnecessary.
Another big issue is the monitor you will use. Even the fastest LCDs still have 10 milliseconds display lag, opposed to the 670 nanoseconds of CRTs, so I think using a CRT is advisable. However, it’s not that easy to obtain a CRT that can display 480p. Most abundant are old PC monitors, which always do 480p60, but you need VGA cables for those.
There are VGA cables for both Gamecube and Wii, but the former are hard to find / expensive and the latter are of lower quality than the Gamecube ones and none of the VGA splitters I use work with them. If you go for a capture card without a pass-through daughterboard, you need to split the VGA signal, though, so essentially you can only go with Gamecubes.
This isn’t too bad, though, since lately there have been
reports that the Gamecube’s 480p output is of considerably higher quality than the Wii’s anyway.
Even the Gamecube’s video output is limited to 4:2:2 subsampling, though, but it doesn’t really matter since Twitch / Youtube downsample to 4:2:0 anyway. ( ;_; )
Gamecube VGA cables are semi-official—they are mods of the official component / D-Terminal cables. You can modify them yourself or buy them online for ~90$. (Expensive, but worth it imho, although I got lucky and bought 4 of them for ~20€ each; this price is really rare nowadays though, unfortunately.)
I hope this is not too much information, but you seem like you care about the quality and I’ve read / experimented quite a lot about this so I figured you could make use of my findings.
