The Mess-Hall Blog

Me (Dazbobaby AKA theDAZBOMEGATRON), Symonator, and Astrozombie1, have all had this piece of capture equipment for some time now, so we know what it’s like, how it works, and how well it does it’s job.
First, let me describe the hardware:
Well, it’s a sleek dark gray box, it has standard video and audio inputs at the front, a power light, and a remote control. DOH!, you can see the picture for yourself.
It’s quite small for what it does, it’s about a quarter of the size of a SKY+ box. So there, now you know how big it and how it looks. Well, not entirely, but we’ll come to that.
I use it exclusively for capturing video from my PS3. I used to have a black magic intensity pro, which did a brilliant job, only problem with that, my PC was’nt fast enough to cope with the data rates, audio, and compression on the fly.
Let me say that the Hauppauge does ALL of that for you. Then it will pass the video and audio over to the pc at a rate that even a low end pc should manage. You see, it compresses the video for you. But even though it does hard work, the files can still be HUGE. A 10 minute video can still reach sizes of upto 1 gigabyte. You can vary the amount of compression too, you have a choice in bit rates, using a simple slider. I find that 5 megabits is fine for virtually any video source, for local playback and uploading to youtube. 8 megabits is better for local playback only, and if you record from say SKY HD, it’s probably a good idea not to go much higher. You can if you really want to, if you record from a HD camcorder for example, you could up it all the way to 13.5 megabits, but you’ll need a MASSIVE hard drive.
One other thing you can do with it is capture screen shots, you can’t do it from the capture programme, you need to run the playback programme to screen grab. Thats something else too, it comes with Arcsoft Total Media Extreme, a pretty good piece of software. It will convert, playback and grab everything the HD-PVR will throw at it. You will need a different programme if you want to edit any video’s that you create. I use Sony Vegas Pro, it’s small, but does everything I need.
When you do capture, and lets face it, you dont spend £150+ for a box to just sit there doing nothing, you’ll be treated to a fair bit of noise, because it has a built in dedicated H.264 processor, it needs a fan to keep this bad boy cool, and that can make quite a noise, not so much that you cant hear the tv, but enough to cause a distraction. Still the “BLING” does make up for it.

Wiring up the HD-PVR is a piece of cake, and it also comes with high quality component cables to connect to your TV.

With inputs at the bottom and outputs at the top, and a TOS-LINK fibre optical in and out for the audio.
Not forgetting the standard components at the front, with an svideo, you’ve probably got all options covered.

Pro’s:
Small, light, compresses for you, adjustable bit rates, optical audio, 5.1 capture, recoding software if you need it, you can disable the “BLING”, good quality component cable included, remote control, plenty of different recording sources, and excellent capture quality.
Con’s:
Can make a fair amount of noise, remote for me has never worked, slight 2 second delay in capture (zero delay on the TV pass through, so gaming is still fun), no live screen grab.

I have’nt listed the price as a disadvantage, because if you’re looking for HD capture, you know you are going to be paying a chunk of change. Despite the price tag, I think it’s a good price to pay as it really is a good piece of kit, all three of us swear by it. And that should be enough to persuade anyone to buy this over anything else.
One word of warning though, do check your HD equipment before you run out and buy anything, some SKY HD boxes only carry HDMI out, and NOTHING can record HDMI with HDCP (high definition copy protection) turned on.
Thanks for reading.
Dazbobaby

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