Video Capture Card

The Hauppauge HDPVR is garbage. It most definitely creates lag on your signal if you try to use it as a pass-through device. You should NEVER use any recording device in pass-through, you want to SPLIT the signal before you record and send an uncompromised signal to the television where people are playing (I use a Ce-Labs Distribution Amplifier). That Wipeout video has some major compression and blocking issues that look horrible to the trained eye. The more you get into video encoding, the easier it is to see these problems and the HARDER it becomes for you to ignore them.

Flash M4V AVC is also a bad compression format. 45mb for 25 seconds? Check this video out:
http://www.8wayrun.com/SC4.Intro.SeizeYourDestiny.mkv

This video is 114mb for 180 seconds. Not to mention I encoded this video on December 2, 2008... so the compression techniques are pretty dated. But you'll notice almost no artifacting or blocking in this video... The problem with the Hauppauge is that it compresses the video as it records. The quality of your output can only be as good as the weakest link in your video... and with Hauppauge, it pretty much creates a weak link the moment you click the record button. Hauppauge has to do this compression because it can't handle the data rates as it doesn't even give an option for a raid-0 array. 1GB per minute is the most it can write.

Unless you can read Japanese, the BMI is really the ONLY solution you should be considering... especially since the Pro version is the same price as the Hauppauge and is just so much better. If you have USB3.0 on your computer, then the BMI Shuttle is the obvious choice, even though its a bit more expensive.
 
Hey, stop hurting my feelings :) I didn't say it was great, but it's what I use and it works. I agree that the 13.5 Mbps it records at isn't optimal, but the majority of videos out there are far worse anyway. However, the pass-through lag you're talking about I can't agree on. From what I've read that box has no lag, and from what I understand there is no reason why it should have any more lag than a splitter. Perhaps splitting the signal is exactly what the box does.

The example video was not an example of great quality/filesize ratio. It was just an example of how it looks. It's probably encoded at too high quality compared to the relatively low quality recorded by the box. It's also a 60 fps video whereas your video is a 30 fps video running at 60 fps, so we can cut 45mb down to half that for comparison's sake. Regarding M4V, I don't really know how that happened. It usually comes out as MP4, except that one time. Perhaps I checked some box I shouldn't have by mistake.

If video quality is the main concern I'm not going to recommend Hauppauge either. But it's easy to use, and it doesn't require any Raid-0 array, whatever that is :) And for what it's worth, recordings of 30 fps video looks better since it's easier to squeeze 30 frames into 13.5 Mbits than 60 frames.

Anyway, since I've got your attention, I'll use this oppurtunity to say thank you very much for this site and for trying to keep the community alive!
 
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