Hauppauge HD PVR Gaming Edition Review

Setting up the PVR was a breeze, the included diagram was simple to follow and having all the required cable made things a whole lot easier too, it took about 5 minutes to install everything but most of that time was due to the location of my TV and the pristine wiring setup that I demand from my home cinema, you could easily plug this thing in and have it up and running in a 1-2 mins if you weren’t fussed about organisation.

Once I had the device wired in, I fired up the included CD-Rom, which contained the ArcSoft ShowBiz software, it was simple to install, only took about 2-3 minutes to get it up and running.  Once that was done I connected the USB cable that was already attached to my PVR and the ShowBiz software quickly detected the capture device, treating the PVR much like a webcam, the software did in fact pick up my web cam as a capture device too, but fortunately there is a drop down selection box to pick which device you want.

As you can see below, you have a playback window on the right, used for previewing your footage in real-time or playback or clips on the left, it’s as simple as hit record, hit stop, you have your movie.  While the software does feature a simple timeline editor, letting you add music, voice overs, text, transitions and upload directly to YouTube, the software isn’t what today’s review is really about, but while not exactly feature heavy the software was more than up to the job and very easy to use.

The only thing I will stress at this point is that it helps to have a computer very close to your PVR, console and TV, for my purpose I had to use my laptop on a little side table, as the USB cable isn’t super long, unless of course you have a dual screen pc setup with component capabilities, which is unlikely, it can get a bit tricky to actually get everything where it needs to  be, as you will be running a lot of devices in close proximity, even more if you intend to run it all through a surround sound system and any other devices you like to keep around you.

Its at this point I must stress, this device does not have a built in hard drive, while it does say HD-PVR it’s a video through-put device, your PC has to do all the actual capturing.

Once up and running I fired up my Xbox and the video output on the Xbox auto adjusted to 1080i, handy too since I was using HDMI @ 1080p before and neither the HD-PVR device or component cables support that resolution output.

As I said, the software was simple to use, with a quick click of the capture button and an editing interface thats as easy as Windows Movie Maker, meaning you can get something recorded and edited in next to no time, check out the video below to view the sort of results I was able to get in a within a couple of minutes.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aifwk9qXldA&hd=1[/youtube]

Hardware encoder:

• H.264 AVCHD video encoder
• AC-3 audio encoding from optical S/PDIF (2 or 5.1 channel audio)
• Recording datarate: from 1 to 13.5 Mbits/sec (user selectable)
• Recording format: AVCHD (.TS and .M2TS) and .MP4 Resolution up to 1080i from component video (YCrCb and YPrPb).