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 BOX
In 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 HARDWARE
To 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 DRIVERS
Magewell 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.
Debian
sudo apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) make gcc binutilsFedora
sudo 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.shNow you can run the Magewell info utility to verify that everything makes with the working.
sudo mweco-info -lARM DRIVERS
Welcome 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 ARM drivers compile against the 6.1 vendor kernel, but that’s about all they do.
The first thing you need to do is head over to the downloads section and grab the latest Eco Capture Linux Driver for Jetson TX2.
Now it’s time to crack open a terminal and install some dependencies.
sudo apt install make gcc binutilsInstall the kernel headers using Armbian Config.
sudo armbian-configThe adventure tree goes: System > Kernel > Install Linux Headers
Extract the *.gz archive and change into the EcoCaptureForLinuxX86 directory.
tar -xf Eco* ; rm Eco*.gz ; cd Eco*Run the installer script.
./install.shNow you can run the Magewell info utility to verify that everything makes with the working.
sudo mweco-info -lOBS & WEBRTC
The Eco Capture Dual HDMI M.2 shows up like any other V4L2 device in OBS. I didn’t run into any issues while capturing two 1080p 60 streams.
And if you’re wondering, yes, the Eco Capture Dual HDMI M.2 can be used as a webcam in WebRTC apps like Discord, Jitsi, and Zoom.
PIXEL PEEPING
Somewhere around 2010, capturing video from digital sources became a solved problem. In 2025, even a $10 “sh*tbox” HDMI encoder (on the left) looks alright serviceable. The Eco Capture Dual HDMI M.2 and Decklink Mini 4K Recorder have identical picture quality and latency, but the Magewell does a decidedly better job at fitting into an M.2 hole – and this is the important bit.
VERDICT
I’ve been using this critter in the studio for the past couple of weeks without so much as a hiccup. That said, at $385 the Eco Capture Dual HDMI M.2 isn’t something you pick up just to play around with. You’re going to need a good reason. Fortunately, that good reason came in the form of finding a gang of new, in-box units on eBay selling for anywhere between $60 and $100.
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