Avermedia LGP 2 Plus - Record HDMI - Setup Mac and finally got it working
I brought the Avermedia LGP 2 Plus recently from Amazon because from what I read it was the easiest way to record the screen and that it supported 4k passthrough sounded like a great way to have something a bit futureproof, 4k screens and projectors are beginning to be more common and the idea device would not change anything.
TL;DR; Solution at the end!
I opened it up and connected it to power and connected the HDMI cable to the computer and tried to press the record button. You couldn't or nothing happened because it was just showing red.
Tried updating
I tried to update the firmware to see it that would work, but that did not and it didn't work like the website said.
All the software was basicly for Windows and I only have a Mac, so couldn't use any of the configuration software. The updater for Mac basically told that I had to plug in the device. Major disappointment and of course not manual and no way to know what the blinking LED on the device meant.
Wrong SD format
Then I read on the internet if it was because a wrong filesystem format on the SD Card. It says it supports ExFat but other people on the internet says it has to be FAT32. Next problem, DiskUtil that you can use for reformatting devices on Mac, will fail if you try to format SD Cards that are larger than 32 GB's to FAT32 for some reason.
Now Google and figure out how to do it from the commandline.
# FIND THE DISK NUMBER
$ diskutil list
# REPLACE THE DISK NUMBER
$ diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 AVER MBRFormat /dev/disk3 # REPLACE HERE
That was not the solution, still didn't work!
Discovery
I bought the Avermedia LGP 2 Plus primary for the PC-FREE mode, but I wanted to see if the device was broken or was working, just not the pc-free mode.
I had OBS installed, which is a streaming software, and that has built in functionality to get a output from a capture device and the device showed up there! So far so good! Now I saw the problem, it said "Copyright protected". It wouldn't let me record because the Mac is outputting a signal that is HDCP encrypted, that is to not allow you to record Netflix videos and like that on unauthorized hardware.
Disable HDCP on Mac
It is not possible to disable HDCP on Mac, I had the thought, but I was in doubt because a lot of tutorials minded for games talks about how to disable it on PS4 and XBOX. So that was not the solution.
Solution
The solution was that even pc-free mode requires a pc, not a mac or anything else, you can't get started without a PC! That is maybe the most frustating device with a pc-free mode you can make, and not a single FAQ or manual says a thing about this.
If you have a PC around, simply boot it up and install the RECentral software, go to settings on your device and disable HDCP Proctection.
If you don't have a PC that is still a solution. You can use a virtualized desktop to solve the same problem. Go to https://modern.ie and download a VirtualBox Windows 10 Machine. Activate the USB connections in VirtualBox settings, install the VirtualBox USB Extension, start the Windows Machine, reboot if error, plug the USB into your Mac, click on the USB icon on the bottom corner on the outer frame of the Windows machine, and now do the same instruction as above if you had a Windows machine.
Conclusion
This device is not helpful in debugging as it didn't even write a logfile to the SD Card, that would have been logical! Now that it is working it is quite magical, super easy solution that doesn't require anything intervention on the host computer displaying, simply plugin in two HDMI cables and it works.