The first question that I got asked when I unboxed the Hauppauge HD PVR Gaming Edition was, “Why would someone want to record themselves playing Xbox?”
Why indeed.
There are quite a few reasons, actually—one of them very personal. For years—years—I’ve wanted to have a way to record HD playback of games I’m reviewing. We don’t have debug consoles (the consoles that developers and high-profile game journalists get to play and review pre-release games). I went so far as to build an HTPC with an expensive ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon (remember those?) card that enabled me to at least capture analog composite video… in 4:3… in shittastic quality.
There are other reasons, of course. After all, the market for “video game bloggers and journalists who aren’t privy to debug units” is probably quite small.
Say you’re into fighting games or e-sports. You want to watch people playing fighters, critique others, see your own performances, and share your gameplay with your community. A quick search on YouTube reveals quite a community behind every fighting game. This person, for example, is sharing their Wesker combos in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The commentators are giving their opinions and critiques. It’s fun. It’s how you share your hobby.
You can learn a lot by watching playback videos, but making them has always been quite a technical challenge. Hauppauge hopes to help alleviate that curve with the HD PVR Gaming Edition.
Hardware
The HD PVR unit itself is essentially an interface between your PC and your console. The HD PVR comes with a three-way breakout cable that connects Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and PlayStation 3 consoles to the unit. That’s the input. The output consists of a (very high quality) component HD cable that goes into your television. This limits you to 720p playback and also prevents use of HDMI (and thus HDCP, meaning you can’t play back Blu-ray movies and capture them on this unit).
The cables are substantial
One of my immediate questions was “How does this affect image quality”? There is a slightly noticeable ghosting effect in dark areas with bright contrasting colors, but really you only see it if you’re up close to the television or monitor. Jumping ahead a bit, let it be known that the ghosting is only seen in the output from the video pass-through of the PVR, not what is actually recorded. Said another way: you will not see ghosting in your captured videos. If you’re used to the crisp 1080p all-digital signal from your consoles, you’ll experience some frustration at having to go back to 720p analog while recording. Wii users will not notice any difference except that the capture results in 720×480 output.
There are also audio pass-throughs for both analog and optical. The PVR connects to your PC via USB 2.0. Curiously, there’s also an IR receiver on the front, but the Gamer Edition unit doesn’t come with a remote, though you can get one from Hauppauge.
Software
The included CD comes with drivers for the unit, though they were out of date, and a copy of Arcsoft ShowBiz. A quick trip to Hauppauge’s support page provided the latest WHQL-Certified drivers, which also had a nice list of bugfixes. Arcsoft Showbiz is a minimal editing program that should get most people through whatever tasks they need to accomplish, including direct uploading to YouTube. It’s also the capture software for the PVR unit.
While the HD PVR Gaming Edition comes with software for Windows, the unit is also supported by third parties for Mac and Linux users. Mac users will need to purchase a separate piece of software, while Linux users will have to go through the usual mumbo-jumbo of “figuring it out”. Currently there is some limited MythTV support, but as is always the case with Linux, some nerd will get it working. Maybe it can be you.
Capturing
When you click “record”, a strip of LEDs around the PVR unit turns bright green, which is more than just a very cool effect—it’s very helpful to see, at a glance from afar, that the thing is very definitely in record mode. Leaving a PVR running because you forgot it’s still recording can result in some 4+gb file hilarity, so you want to avoid that.
My impromptu video game capture setup
My first run with Showbiz resulted in a video that actually contained audio/video sync errors:
The sync starts out well enough, but towards the end of the video the audio is very jarringly out of sync with the video.
I messed around with some of the settings and ended up with a perfectly synced clip. This is a round of Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 played through an Xbox 360:
One of the odd things about the settings I used to capture is that the Showbiz capture app defaults to “4:3”. I switched it to 16:9 because, well, that’s what I’m using. That’s when I experienced the sync issues. Switching back to the default 4:3 resulted in the second clip, which as you can see is clearly 16:9. Whatever works.
The ShowBiz app will capture in two formats: AVCHD and M2TS. I used 720p 60fps AVCHD and brought the files into Premiere Pro for editing, which had no issues with it. Unfortunately, Premiere Pro will not recognize the PVR as a valid capture device (because it uses USB instead of IEEE 1394), but Arcsoft Showbiz does the job well enough.
You can adjust the bitrate of the raw captures. The default is 6mbps, but you can go up to 13mbps if you really want to push the issue. You can also snap frame-perfect deinterlaced 1280×720 screenshots with a single click.
Showbiz uses hardware acceleration as well. I did notice that there were frame skips on my laptop during my very first recording session and then I realized it was because I hadn’t turned on the laptop in a couple of months and it was downloading ten bazillion updates on top of syncing 1300 files in my Dropbox library, causing a great deal of disk activity. When I let that finish and made sure there was low disk activity, captures were perfect. As with any video capture solution, they are demanding on hardware, so make sure you turn off unnecessary services and tasks when capturing.
Annoyances
One of the biggest annoyances is that there is only a single input cable with three heads on it, for each of the consoles. My consoles are not near each other—therefore I have to unplug and move the cord around to whatever console I want to capture. I realize this is a very minor annoyance since most people will be using this for a single console only. I wish there was some technical voodoo that allowed 1080p HDMI capture, but I know that’s beyond the scope of consumer-level capture hardware right now. The ghosting is slightly annoying, but it’s really not a big deal overall and, again, it doesn’t show up in the final output.
Another annoyance is that the USB cable that connects the unit to your PC or laptop is only six feet long. That means you have to have a laptop or desktop very near your console setup. For those of us with living room-based entertainment centers, this means we have to lug a laptop over to our consoles. First world problems.
If I was a Mac user, I’d be annoyed that I have to pay extra for software. Then again, if I was a Mac user, I wouldn’t be playing games har har har.
Wrap-up
The Hauppauge HD PVR Gaming Edition is a really cool little box. I goofed around with it all night, recording myself going fast SANIC HADGHOG on the Wii Virtual Console, played several matches of UMvC3 with my son while recording them for hilarity, and had some great ideas about what kinds of videos you could make with this device. I don’t have cable TV, but there’s no reason why a component HD cable box couldn’t be routed through this thing either.
The HD PVR Gaming Edition is available now for an MSRP of $199. Amazon has it, as does Newegg.
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