Avermedia Live Gamer HD PCIe H.264 Capture Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,495 words · ~7 min read
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Welcome to another unboxing in first look. And I'm totally going to do this.
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I'm going to put on the little
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We're filming in 60 FPS, which will be of zero benefit to y'all on the uh the
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YouTubes, but uh that'll make the motion clear for when I review the footage
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later. This is the Aver Media Recentral Live Gamer HD. Capture and share your PC
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game footage. Okay, full HD 1080p. There's a sticker on here. So, it seems
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it was probably added sometime after the packaging design, but you can live stream with XSplit. This thing is very,
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very compatible with XSplit streaming software, and it makes it very easy to
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use. See, no plastic seal. This is not
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my first time opening this product. I have actually used it already, and it's
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pretty faking awesome. So, let's go ahead and have a look at the back of the
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packaging here. And I want to show you guys what's going on. So, we got HDMI or
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DVI connectors. You can just use you can adapt DVI to HDMI. So, it has an input
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and an output. That's how you it gets a signal from your video card and then
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passes it through to your monitor. It uses a PCI Express interface because due
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to the enormous amount of bandwidth involved in capturing HDMI, it does need
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PCIe. It has an H.264 hardware compression engine built into it. So,
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the major advantage of this approach versus something like a Blackmagic
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Intensity Pro, which is one of the other most commonly used HDMI capture cards,
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is that while you lose some of the color
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depth and some of the subsampling and whatnot, you gain the fact that your CPU
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is not responsible for doing any of the compression. Remember guys, if you're
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not compressing 1080p footage, you're going to be working with enormous files
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that you'll have to have like a multiple hard drive array or an SSD to even copy
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those files from the capture device to your hard drive. All right, moving right
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along. You got a dedicated record button, so you can easily just press the
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button when you're ready to record. And Rec Central, so that's their software.
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Recentral allows you to configure it as much or as little as you want. So, you
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can either use the totally I forget what they call them, but it's like capture
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wizard or amateur. So, you can there's three different wizards that you can use
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to set it up. And one of them is so simple. You basically press the button and it's ready to go. You can record
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voice commentary with your gameplay. That's good. It does have a pass through for audio as well. Stream your live
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gameplay over the internet using uh Twitch TV or XSplit to Twitch TV. Uh
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profile selection and overview. Yeah, the profiles. Those are easy. So, there
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you go. The maximum recording quality is 1080p at 30 FPS. You can also do 720p at
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60 FPS if you prefer to have a more
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fluid frame rate versus a higher overall resolution. Remember, most people
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watching your video are not going to be watching it at full screen. So, if you
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filmed at 720p in order to get better fluidity, especially for something like
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FPS gaming, you might find that to be an advantage. The packaging is excellent.
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See, they got like a cool little sort of shimmery black sort of thing going on on
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the cover for this. And uh Oh, right. Another reason you might want to film at
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720p 60 FPS is if you're capturing from a console. So, it's fully capable of
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capturing from the PC you're gaming on, from another PC that you're not gaming
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on. Although, there's not much point in doing that because a big part of the
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advantage is the built-in uh the built-NVIDIA engine in here that makes
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it so you don't have to waste CPU cycles. And you can also use it to
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capture console footage on a PC that is nearby. So before we get too far into
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the uh device itself, let's have a look at all the other stuff that's included.
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So first things first, there's our
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ready to record button. It's just a USB sort of software enabled hardware button
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that you can keep up on your desk. We've also got their software which is
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included, but you can also download on the Aver Media website. They've made so
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many revisions to the software over the last little while that continue to
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improve it. I'm very impressed with the way that they continue to support the
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product. Sometimes you see these kinds of products where they're kind of purpose-built specialty pieces of
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hardware and they'll kind of release it and they'll go, "Oh yeah, no, the software is fine. Just don't worry about
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it." Um, but it's not fine and you do have to worry about it. In this case,
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they are actually trying to make sure that they're keeping everything updated
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and everything coup xsplit broadcaster
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gift certificate. Oh, okay. Cool. So, apparently they're giving you a deal on
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XSplit. XSplit is awesome, by the way. XSplit is what I use to do my live
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streams. Um, okay. Content. Okay. We're
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not going to read too much about that. Let's have a look at included accessories. So, just a three and a half
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millimeter audio cable. Uh, oh, look at
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that. They include uh a DVI to HDMI adapter. So, if you
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wanted to capture HDMI in from a DVI
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output on a video card, you just go like that. Well, you'd have to have a DVI
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cable out to this, but you guys get the point. So you might go HDMI out to your
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DVI monitor and sort of everything would be cool. And then this one is for the
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other way around, right? So this one, so you can go out from DVI from your video
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card and then use a small HDMI cable to go into here. And they actually include
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the HDMI cable you need. So they include pretty much all the cables you need to
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get going because you'll already have DVI out from your from your video card.
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That's what they're assuming. So you just
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Excuse me. Sorry. You swap this. You use this HDMI cable to go into the input and
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then you go DVI out to your monitor and you're ready to go. So, we'll have a
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close look at the card itself. It's got sort of a, you know, shield on it that
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may or may not do anything, but looks really nice. It's got like a brushed
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metal finish on it. There's your PCI Express OneX interface. Flipping over to
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the back, um, just got some logos and
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stuff. And this is the business end. So, there's your HDMI out that goes out to
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the device you're going to be using to monitor what's actually going on. So your monitor or your TV there's HDMI in
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that goes from the device that's outputting the signal you want to capture audio out and audio in to go
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along with those although you are not forced to use the analog connectors you
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can also capture audio over HDMI which I
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have done with this card already.
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So what's the point? Lots of people are streaming on XSplit. Okay, do yourselves
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a favor. Go look up PewDiePie on YouTube.
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Mind blown. It's the most bizarre thing in the world, but he's making hundreds
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of thousands of dollars streaming games and sort of having a webcam going in the
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background. So, I'm not saying that you buy one of these, you're going to make back your investment like that. But, if
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you're good at it, then there's a huge advantage to having something like this
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because instead of using up CPU cycles, which will cause your game performance
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to degrade because unless you have a beast CPU, that's just what happens.
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This does all the compression of the footage on its own. You can use it to
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capture external sources such as consoles as well. So, it gives you more
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flexibility and it works very seamlessly
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compared to and the compatibility is better compared to the Blackmagic
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Intensity Pro that I also own. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing and
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first look at the A Media Live Gamer HD. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech
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