Too lazy to take my own picture, sorry.
Anyway, two reviews in a week? What is this sorcery!
Well basically the capture card market is standing still right now. Nothing new has been released in months since the Live Gamer Extreme, so I've decided to look at older cards.
Installation and setup
Nothing to really say with the installation, it's USB2. Plug it into a spare USB2 (or USB3) port. Download the software and drivers from AVerMedia's GamerZone website and that's it.
RECentral Software
If you read my Extreme review, you know how much I hate when manufacturers give the user ample configuration over stuff such as resolution and frame rate but weirdly, I don't mind it too much here. The user interface is really slick and it flows together really well and it keeps you in check most of the time... I like... this. I never thought I'd be saying like and AVerMedia in the same sentence but here we are.
What I am really perplexed about is that in this older version of RECentral, selecting 60 for the frame rate actually outputs you a correct console 59.94 fps video. Why does the newer software not do this?
Live Stream Engine
I really wish more manufacturers who use tailored capturing software for their device (e.g. Elgato) would use something similar to this. The live stream engine basically acts similar to AmaRecTVs live function in which you can locally record while piping the video to XSplit/OBS. It's really great and works well.
The problem (which really isn't a problem since we're not supposed to be doing this) is that HDCP is still enforced over live stream engine. Maybe the guy can patch this additional program but for now you will still need HDCP stripping if you are live streaming the PS3.
I should also say that I have been able to use live stream engine to pipe DirectShow video into AmaRecTV but I wouldn't advise it. AmaRecTV crashed often when selecting device information but I was glad they used YUY2 sampling at least. The problem is that the stream engine quality is dictated by what bit rate you set in the stream engine, so you may as well not bother as recording x264vfw lossless or equivalent would not gain you any extra quality.
HDMI capture quality
With proper 59.94 fps recording and 60 Mbps, there's no issue with HDMI capture quality for sure.
Component capture quality
Unfortunately I can't say the same for Component. It's very bad and the colors are completely wrong. Not just because they flagged BT.709 for everything, it's much worse than that.
Again, we are back to the Clock Tower test to illustrate my point.
The top 2 are what I would consider "good" Component capture. Click to enlarge all pictures.
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| Blackmagic Shuttle |
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| Live Gamer Extreme |
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| Live Gamer Portable |
Of course Component is converted to HDMI for passthrough which is lagless as far as I can tell, other reviews say the same thing. I did hear reports that sometimes the passthrough will go black for a couple of seconds but I didn't experience it on this particular unit. I have however seen other units exhibit this problem. It only seems to effect Component video though, most notably the Wii.
Microphone/headphone ports
Didn't bother to test the microphone port since nobody should ever use it. I did however play around with the headphone port and it's actually really nice. To have a port so close to you instead of having to constantly plug the headphones into the back of my monitor is amazing. I wish more manufacturers would do this and it's definitely a plus point for the device.
Preview latency and lag
I was very surprised by the preview latency for a USB2 device. The latency was around 8-9 frames on my laptop. Not good enough to do any serious gaming on but probably fine that you wouldn't need to delay your microphone when live streaming.
I do however have a pretty big issue left to discuss. When watching the preview, it dropped a lot of frames. For example, I made Ryu do a jumping roundhouse kick on Dan (Super Street Fighter IV) and the preview window of XSplit completely missed the whole animation of his kick. He jumped and then suddenly he was on the ground. The significant frame drops seem to happen every 30-40 seconds that it's a real problem when live streaming as your viewers will see this. I should note that the passthrough is perfect and does not exhibit any of these issues.
I actually thought it might be a problem with my USB3 ports but I plugged in my Elgato and that was perfectly fine and I saw no frame drops.
Conclusion
A pretty decent try from AVerMedia with some cool features but the bad Component capture along with constant frame drops on the preview makes this product very hard to recommend. If you are in the market for a USB2 solution, I'd highly suggest the Elgato Game Capture HD over this.
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