Avermedia Live Gamer Portable Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,470 words · ~12 min read
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Vengeance gaming to learn more welcome to my unboxing and first look at the a
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media live gamer portable now we covered
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the live gamer HD not that long ago the
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main disadvantage of the live gamer HD
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is that it relies on a PCI Express slot
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in order to operate so that means that if you're recording PC footage then
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that's fine because you have a PC that you're using anyway so you might as well
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just you know have the live gamer HD which is great cuz it offloads from the
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CPU with its Hardware h264 encoder and all that good all that good stuff but it
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h i mean it wasn't really the optimal solution for console Gamers who want to
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record their gameplay because you had to have a PC nearby this kind of solves
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that problem and by kind of solves that problem I mean completely solves that
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problem in a really big way this is the live game reportable it comes with 3
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months of a premium license for xsplit meaning you get the update the upgraded
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audio codec which is the most important thing about premium you can also have
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more scenes it's okay smart and sharp your allpurpose sharing weapon yeah yeah
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yeah all that good stuff it's USB 2 so
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flexible connectivity between PC and game consoles USB interface for direct
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PC connectivity a simple flip of the switch for PC free mode there you go
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that's the one that I think is most exciting about this product because
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otherwise the PCI Express version is already fantastic fantastic and has this
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functionality so aha so they say for class 10 SDHC cards fat 32 this one can
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operate without a PC now it can't capture 1080p 30fps without a PC uh
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because it just whether it's the bit rates or whatever else I think the bit
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rates are up to 60 megabit per second for 1080p 30 FPS with this particular
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device so an SD card is just not going to handle it but it will do 720p no
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problem recording an SD card and given that you're probably recording from a
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console and many of the games run in 720p or upsampled 720p anyway you should
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be getting most of the quality anyhow so here you go PC mode SD card mode when
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you're in PC mode what you do is you plug it in via USB 2 and then you are
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able to record from a variety of different inputs including HDMI and AVN
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so they include the adapters you need in the box so we'll uh uh we'll we'll get
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that opened up a little bit here and then the output so the pass through is
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capable of doing up to 1920 x 1080 60 FPS so basically what that means guys is
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you're able to game at 60 frames per second and record and stream
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concurrently at 30 frames per second it also uses the same excellent software as
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the PCI Express version so you've got a bunch of advanced functionality it is so
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simple to set up I have a number of capture cards now including a black
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magic intensity Pro and an a media live gamer HD their Rec Central is is a
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billion times easier to use you just press like the easy setup mode one and
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then just it just goes like you don't have to worry about it we actually did an NCIX Tech tips episode back when we
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got that card showing how easy it was to use and there really wasn't much of an
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advantage to using expert mode unless you're really fine-tuning things so
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audio in audio capture is also possible so you can either capture your
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commentary constantly or you can mute it and go sort of in and out of it much
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like the live gamer HD and this is something that the more gaming or oriented capture cards don't have it has
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a hardware or it has a hardwired button so you basically just press that when
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you're ready to record and the software itself stays primed and ready to go so
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you just be like yep I'm ready to go now here we go and other than that that's
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it there goes a motorcycle the device is
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actually powered over USB as well as
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accepting all the data that it needs over USB so very very very cool so let's
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go ahead and put that there and let's have a look at what we've got included in terms of accessories
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come on out oh this is this is not working okay so what's this xplit
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broadcaster so there's your three fre months of xplit Premium
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cool and then we've got gamer zone.com a
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gamer zone. a media.com so that's where you'll get the latest Rec Central uh
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which like I said before you will want because it's
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excellent okay and then inside here we'll get all the accessories including
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presumably a component adapter so that those Xbox 360 and PS3 Gamers who either
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don't have HDMI or can't use HDMI for whatever reason will be able to connect
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so there is ah yes okay what the okay so
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that yeah okay so there's one of our console adapters so this goes out from
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here to presumably I think that's a PS3 adapter I'm not much of a console guy to
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be perfectly honest those of you who watch this regularly will already know that so I don't even know or care what
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that plugs into but the point is it plugs into one of the consoles I think
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it's uh one of I think it's PS3 that
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doesn't support HDMI capture because of
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hdcp so presumably that's PS3 Xbox 360
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they're probably assuming you're going to use HDMI so they include an extra
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HDMI cable because what you're doing is you're adding a pass through so you're
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going to go HDMI in from your console to
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this okay and then you're going to go whoops and then you're going to go out
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to the TV now we did some gaming with
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the live gamer HD to find out sort of we were like oh okay well if there's
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capture Hardware in here and if there's all that stuff going on is this going to
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add any significant latency to the point where it's going to affect the gameplay
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experience and the answer is no we didn't notice any difference between
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running on a TV through the pass through versus running out directly to the TV
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which is really important the last thing you want to do is be in a situation
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where it's like yeah I want to record my epic game plays and then the tool that allows you to do that makes it so your
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game plays are not not so epic anymore which leads us into the rest of the
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accessories that we have here below so here's your straight component input so
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there you can plug that into the adapter as well so that's got your RGB as well
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as your audio cables conveniently colorcoded so the blue ones are for
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audio this has always been kind of funny to me that the uh the labeling standards
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for red component is the same as the right channel for audio so that just
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goes in there no big deal and then you can run whatever component cables you
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already happen to have on hand over there and then we've also got a USB
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connector which will be for using the supplied mini USB cable is recommended
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interesting so there you go maybe try not to lose that although I mean I can't
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really imagine there being any difference but uh there you go so it's a
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to uh a to mini B there you go and that
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powers it and as well as gives you data and then they provide an audio cable so
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because you're again you're adding one because you have a pass through as well
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so commentary can be enabled and disabled with a push to talk or a hot
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key button and the footage is actually recorded with 422 that's color depth
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would be the right term for that right Boll yeah 422 color depth so it's
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basically more information than 420 for example uh but it is recorded using an
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h264 uh format and the reason for that is we're limited by the usb2 data rate
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and quite frankly we could end up limited by no I think usb3 would be
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capable of capturing uncompressed I mean it's not really the intention of this device to replace sort of professional
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grade capture devices where you're trying to capture with sort of 444 color
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and you want uncompressed footage that's going to record I mean it would fill up
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this SD card in a matter of seconds if you were capturing that kind of footage
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so it's it's not the intention but the idea here is using the onboard encoder
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to give you a format that's easy to work with preserves enough of the color
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Clarity that you're going to be able to do whatever it is you need to do with it
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bearing in mind again you're not shooting with a cinema picture profile
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or something like that you're recording from a computer so the way it looks when
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you record it should pretty much be the way it's going to look when you output
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it whereas with a camera you want to record with sort of weird profiles that
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allow you to do a lot more in post production see I'm getting a smile from my crew because this was stuff I never
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understood before they they edicated me and I was like no no you want it to look
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good in the viewfinder right and they're like no no no it's not not actually
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what's important um the LED ring around the outside of the button here can
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indicate to you uh whether it's recording right now it can also so so by
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the color as well as the uh flickering of it you can tell exactly what the
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device happens to be doing and you can see here this was a uh sample provided
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to Linus Tech tips so I will be definitely trying this guy out in fact I
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guess it's possible we could use I mean this will be super handy we could use
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this to record a mine and Slick Super Mario World live stream which would be
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kind of freaking awesome because this is portable we just cheuck an SD card in
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there and like yeah oh that's exciting I
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didn't even think about that what else can I say oh yeah time shift
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functionality so what's cool about this is it actually acts as a bit of a buffer
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so instead of sort of oh oh you know I
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um want to record that but it just happened you can actually use their time
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shift functionality to go back and grab stuff that you otherwise may have missed
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and I think that's pretty much it I mean honestly guys what sets this apart from
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other capture devices because there's other stuff out there haage has one uh
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sort of the prograde guys like Blackmagic have stuff like their PCI
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Express cards their external cards what sets us apart it's the gaming optimized
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features it's things like the excellent integration with xplit the a media card
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was easier to get working with xplit cuz I didn't have to dink around with black
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Magic's software in order to get it exactly the right way before it actually
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works no it just worked okay so there's that there's the fact that it comes with
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the xplit license for 3 months there's the fact that it has functionality like
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oh I'm I'm ready to record now I'm not ready to record now having that Hardware
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button actually is kind of Handy and I
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mean what else really sets it apart yeah I mean the integration that's
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what's good about it there you go and it works really well it's more of a
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consumer grade device that you don't really have to fight with so thanks for checking out my unboxing and first look
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at the live gamer portable I will definitely give you guys my full
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impressions of it once we've actually used it but I'm basically saying that
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it's awesome already just based on my experience with the live gamer HD so
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don't forget to subscribe to Li Tech tips from unboxings reviews and other
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computer videos oh yeah it comes with a sweet little case in the Box too I
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actually didn't show that during the unboxing video so there you go I wish it
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was a little bit bigger and it had space for the cables but I don't know I guess
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it's it's padded so you can see there's some padding to it it's going to prevent
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like you know scratches and sort of incidental accidental drops to the
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actual delicate part of your Machinery something I also didn't mention before
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is it doesn't support 1920 x 1200 so 1920 x 1080 only okay guys for the full
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list of supported input and output resolutions you're going to want to check with Aver media also one thing
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that I don't want to guarantee because I haven't tried it I've only used HDMI
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pass through remember guys with a with an analog input it is going to be
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doing some processing inside before it can output to HDMI so it might introduce
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some input latency I don't know haven't tried that but with a hardware encoder
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it shouldn't be much that's for sure okay now I think I covered everything
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and we're done see you got a little a media there