Developer xerpi, who’s given numerous great contributions to the scene, such as ds3vita/ds4vita/libvita2d and so on, has now decided to share with us some more of his great work. This time around, it’s a plugin he’s working on that lets you stream your Vita’s screen to your computer through USB!

What does making my PSVita work as a UVC device mean?

It seems that xerpi is quite interested in the ‘SceUdcd’ module for the Vita since it lets you use the USB port on the Vita as any USB device. Xerpi has already exploited this module to do some interesting things with it; an example is VitaStick which is a program for the Vita that lets you use it as a game controller on your computer (or any device letting you connect a USB device to it) via USB.

This time around, xerpi decided to start working on the laborious task of making the ‘SceUdcd’ module function as a UVC (USB Video Class) device. Some examples of UVC devices are webcams and USB video capture cards but in this case, it is being used to send data from the Vita’s screen to your computer through, of course, USB.

Awesome! How can I benefit from it?

As the title of this article states, it’s still in PoC (Proof of Concept) stage so don’t get your hopes up too high just yet. Right now, it’s not exactly fast since it uses inefficient code and only works with LiveArea (the UI of the Vita in which you choose bubbles).

Remember, this plugin needed lots of reverse engineering work (which is not an easy task) to get it to this stage so don’t expect it to output 60fps 960×544 (Vita’s screen resolution) to your computer any time soon! That being said, xerpi could possibly continue developing it to a more useable state as he mentioned that the Vita’s hardware colorspace converters and image encoders could be used to make the plugin much more efficient as

everything’s being done via the CPU now.

As for now, the only thing you can do is to test out a pre-alpha version of the plugin by following the link below. Please don’t pester ‘xerpi’ about his work or ask for an ETA!

Reddit thread with more information (+ download link for the pre-alpha plugin): https://www.reddit.com/r/vitahacks/comments/79mrmv/poc_psvita_as_a_uvc_usb_video_class_device/

VitaStick (Xerpi’s other homebrew that uses the ‘SceUdcd’ module): https://github.com/xerpi/vitastick

In a nutshell, you need to install a VPK, copy the plugin to specific directory, add the plugin to taiHEN’s config.txt (load it by a reboot) and open the installed VPK to be able to test it. Reddit user ‘dic1911’ reports it worked for him with VLC’s Video Capture.

The images used for this article are by ‘dic1911’ on Reddit.