Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Hage HD PVR 2. This is the gaming
edition and now includes some pretty significant benefits over the previous
HD PVR. So, for one thing, you've got
zero delay HDMI pass through, which is pretty freaking awesome because
especially if you're using it for game streaming or game commentating or
anything like that, you can't have any kind of an extra delay or lag added by a
device that you're using to record video because then how are you going to
actually play properly? Okay, so instructions here are it's pretty
straightforward. To open, pull sides. Oh, oh, oh, there we go. Then it comes
apart a little something like this. So this looks upon initial inspection like
a very complete package of things that are included. So let's open up the box
itself really quick here and just have a Okay, the size is a little bit or the um
the dimensions of it are a little bit weird. Makes it look kind of like futuristic and UFO if UFO is a word. So
the first thing we find inside is a USB cable. This is USB A to B. There you go.
Very, very supple cable. So, very soft. Very nice. All right. I'm just going to
put garbage in there as we go. The next thing we find inside appears to be a
power brick. All right. Power brick. Oh,
no. That goes there. That goes there. Next, we've got ah component breakout.
So, this will be handy if you do have any HD devices that are not digital. So,
here we've got uh RGB and then stereo
audio connectors. And then those go to a
proprietary connector that plugs into the presumably back of the hage unit,
although I don't see where that goes.
No, this is for Xbox. Oh, yeah. Okay. So, they've included an Xbox connector
which will do something supposedly. We'll be back. And it's a PS3 cable. And
the reason I couldn't figure out what the heck it did was because there's an
additional cable that you actually need to do anything with it. So, this is also
an RGB and stereo audio cable that actually does plug into this. So, if you
did need to go from PS3 out to component
for whatever reason, then you could do this to go into there we go the HDPVR
and then you can go out via HDMI.
So yeah, then we've got two more HDMI
cables as well as their uh their
software that's included. So you should download the latest off of the Hage website. And I'm just going to clean
things up a little bit and we will be back in a moment to show you the unit itself. Hage actually includes some
notes that we should probably talk about very briefly. So because PS3 does not
allow recording over the HDMI output, you have to use the component. That's
why it has these adapters. You have to use component out to record from PS3.
However, it should be noted that this connector with the current firmware
might be a little bit sensitive to vibration. So, just put the PVR to
somewhere where it's not going to be sort of knocked around. I mean, that that should be common sense anyway. They
say they got a lot of calls about it. Come on. But come on, guys. You don't bump an analog connection while it's
connected and then expect it to work 100%. So, just Yeah, just plain don't do
that. Um, also make sure you put it in the right way. They says they got a lot
of calls about that. I don't know why because it was pretty obvious to me that
it doesn't go in this way. So, you turn it around and there you go. It's plugged
in. Push down. Get it? The push is down
when you push push down. Don't worry about it. Uh if you're using with an ATI
graphics card, AMD Radeon graphics card, then you might have issues with um the
latest drivers. So, just turn off hardware acceleration. These are their
tips and tricks. It's nice of them to include that on a little, you know, piece of paper that they pack at the
last minute. make sure that some of these frequently asked questions are
addressed before people have to, you know, pick up a phone and talk to a
human being and figure out how to use the product because I don't want to like
bother with that when I buy something new. I want it to just work. So, the top
of the unit has a gorgeous brushed aluminum finish. It looks like actual
aluminum. Yep, it is. So, make sure you don't touch it too much or leave
fingerprint stains on it because it'll look pretty sweet as long as you don't
do that. Power button is here on the top. And then it's got sort of a a gray
trim that goes around the entire outside of it. The bottom is full of ventilation
holes. So there's a heat sink right there that you can clearly see through the perforations. I hope you can see it.
I can see it. So I'll you'll have to take my word for it. Trust me, it's there. And then the ventilation goes in
the bottom and out the back. It looks like it doesn't need a ton of cooling
though because these feet are quite low profile. So once you put this down,
there's not going to be room for a ton of air flow to be coming in and out of
the unit. So, I wouldn't put this on top of something like an AV receiver, for
example. I'd want to put it on something that doesn't uh exhaust heat because you
don't want to be using what are cooling holes to heat the unit up. Just
something to think about. Um, so in terms of setup, it's pretty
straightforward. There's a number of different ways you can hook it up, and they actually have diagrams in the uh in
the included quick start guide that make it pretty simple, but here's your power
in 6volt DC in. You have a USB connector
to go out to a PC, laptop, or desktop. There's that that component in that uses
this sort of weird harness to connect to it. I would have preferred if they just
had uh I guess yeah, it would take up a lot of space on the back to have fable
component connectors, but okay. HDMI in, HDMI out. So, that can be used for
recording a PC, for recording an Xbox 360, or anything else that isn't HDCP
protected. That's why they have to go with that analog signal for the
PlayStation 3. So, we'll have a look at some of the different ways you can hook
it up. So, here's with a PlayStation 3, you're using that weird component in
thing. USB out to a computer and then HDMI, HDMI out to a TV. So, this is for
streaming. And then next we've got so game console here, I guess. Okay. Not
sure what their point is here. So, let's go with this one. Xbox 360 HDMI in, HDMI
out, USB out to a laptop or desktop PC, and then out to a TV. So the idea is
that the HDMI is a lag free pass through and then USB is where you're actually
recording so that you can upload to something like
um to something like YouTube or you can stream using XSplit or whatever else the
case may be. I don't know if you guys are I don't know if you guys know this, but there is a huge thing going on with
game streaming and game commentary where people are doing sort of like a webcam
view of themselves. They're sitting there playing a game. They're talking about it while they play or I mean a lot
of these guys are basically just vloggers. So they're playing a video game but they're actually talking about
something totally unrelated just so you have something to watch and something to
listen to at the same time and they're not actually necessarily the same thing
as each other. So what is this for? It's for if you don't want to hook up an
entire separate computer with a dedicated capture card in order to do
like a like we had uh we had a setup we did before with the uh Aver Media Live
Gamer HD where we actually had a computer that was set up to do the
capture and streaming. So this is if you just want to run a little box like this
to uh hook that up instead of running it through a computer directly. So thank
you for checking out this unboxing online as tech tips. Don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews,
and other computer videos. I was asked, what's the point of this if uh you have
to have a PC anyway compared to having like a dedicated PCI Express capture
card? Well, the point is you can use a laptop because it's using H.264 encoding
and it does have a hardware encoder inside here. It means that just using
that USB 2 connection, it can stream as much data as it needs to in order to
record a high quality 1080p 30fps video
that you can then do whatever you want with after the fact. It should also be
noted that I actually made a mistake when I was unboxing this. This is the record button so that you can press
record and be sort of ready at a moment's notice to record or not record
something, not a power button, which it's just sort of on all the time once
it's plugged in.