A M.2 HDMI capture card

Summary

Have you ever looked at an NVMe drive and thought to yourself, ‘Hey, this would be 31.7% cooler with HDMI ports?’ Yeah, me neither, but I’ve always wanted to see how well (or if) one of these critters works on Linux.Today is that day.WHY?PCIe slots are becoming an endangered species on modern motherboards, and you know what? I get it. Most people just pop in a GPU and call it a day. Fortunately, those extra PCIe lanes tend to get repurposed as additional M.2 holes. Since that’s “just” an x4 connection, why not feed it something other than a storage device?IN THE BOXIn the box, you get two SHD-to-HDMI Type-A cables, a static-free bag, and the sense that Magewell expects you to figure the rest out. MOUNTING HARDWARETo the best of my knowledge exactly one company sells this elusive sliver of metal, MODDYI. They come in full and low profile. Mounting the SHD-to-HDMI Type-A cables was relatively straightforward, and the Magewell Eco pops in like any other M.2 device. X86 DRIVERSMagewell is pretty good about drivers and the Eco series is no exception. The first thing you need to do is head over to the downloads section and grab the latest Eco Capture Linux x86 Driver.Now it’s time to crack ope a terminal and install some dependencies so we can build the kernel module.Debiansudo apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) make gcc binutilsFedorasudo dnf install kernel-develExtract the *.gz archive and change into the EcoCaptureForLinuxX86 directory.tar -xf Eco* ; rm Eco*.gz ; cd Eco*Run the installer script../install.sh Now you can run the Magewell info utility to verify that everything makes with the working.sudo mweco-info -l ARM DRIVERSWelcome to the “Huh, didn’t expect that to work” section. Magewell offers ARM drivers for the NVIDIA Jetson TX1/2, so I figured they probably wouldn’t work with my Rockchip 3588 SOC, but hey, I’m not one to let logic get in the way of an afternoon of frustration.Long story short, Armbian with kernel 6.14.0-edge is the winning combination. The A...