Now that sites like Twitch.tv have joined the ranks of YouTube as a great destination for game videos, a lot of companies are now making products to help people stream and record their gameplay for viewer consumption. The old days of PVR/DVR hardware capture used to work for grabbing video game footage, but these devices were more suited for over-the-air TV channels, DVR-type time shifting features, and the like. Now, we've got offerings from multiple hardware manufacturers that intend on elegantly solving the many software and hardware issues related to not only capturing the video of your game, but in also making it easy to actually keep playing while you're doing so. Roxio was a company that was mostly well-known for its DVD burning software, but now they're dipping into the hardware arena, and they intend to use their wealth of experience in software to make an all-in-one solution for HD game capture that's easy to set up and convenient to use, yet still produces killer video. The Roxio Game Capture HD Pro is the culmination of those efforts.
Getting started
Featuring a USB interface along with both capture and pass-through of either HDMI or component video signals, this Roxio device is pretty easy to get running. Install the software, Plug it into the computer you want to capture or stream on, then plug your game output video into the Roxio box, and then use another set of cables to then plug the box into your TV or monitor. The idea is that the Roxio hardware passes the signal through to your normal display so that you can play lag-free, but in the meantime it's capturing video.
One thing that's a little disappointing is that all you get in the box is the GCHD Pro itself, the A-to-B USB cable, a quick-start guide, and a software CD - there are no component or HDMI cables included, so if you want to use the pass-through feature (which you'll need in most setups if you want to actually be able to see what you're doing when playing), you'll need to supply those separately. As long as you're not buying these cables at the local electronics store, though, it won't cost too much. One thing is that if you don't have a PS3 component video cable - which you'll need, as you'll see in the next section of the review where I talk about how HDMI is a no-go for the PS3 - that can be had relatively cheap as well on eBay or other sites. You can actually use component cables (not composite!) from a PS2, even, as it's the same port and cable.
Installation of the GCHD Pro's software is relatively easy. Drop the CD in, set an install directory, enter the product key, and register the hardware online, and you're good to go. There's a small launcher program that launches one of three things: an updater utility, the capture software that controls direct recording and livestreaming, and Videowave, the editor that takes captured footage and makes slick final products from it. There's already been one update that brings the software to version SP1, and as you'll see as I go through this review, the hope is that more will be coming - especially for the livestreaming side of things.
Component
During my time using the HD Pro, I mostly used the HDMI interface, although it's important to point out that if you're capturing PS3 footage, you're stuck using component video both to the box and through the box to your TV. Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 use what is called HDCP encryption over the HDMI interface, but for some reason, Sony decided to leave HDCP on all the time whereas the Xbox 360 only turns it on during playback of copyrighted video. Maybe it's because of Sony's involvement in Hollywood, but they don't use common sense to disable HDCP, so consumers and companies (like Roxio here) are hurt. What's worse is that HDCP doesn't actually curb movie piracy.
Either way, you'll have this PS3 component-only issue with most other capture boxes anyway, and the video you capture from a PS3 over component video still looks pretty decent. The visible interference from the analog cables that you'll likely see is kind of annoying and the pass-through system for component video can darken the image on your TV - and 1080p didn't work at all when I tried it - but again, short of a few crazy tricks to work around HDCP on other capture cards, you can't really get around this on PS3 anyway. To be clear: the sub-par experience capturing PS3 footage is Sony's fault, not Roxio's, and many competing devices have the same limitation. Sony could very likely change its HDCP policy without any serious repercussions, especially since Microsoft does it just fine, but it's just up to them to go through with it.
One small thing I should mention is that the GCHD Pro's component and HDMI circuits work entirely separately and you can only capture from one at a time; the box doesn't do any conversion back and forth, and you can't mix the sound from one with the video from another or vice versa. If you're recording in HDMI and want sound, then game sounds must be traveling down that HDMI cable.
HDMI
So let's switch over to the user experience on the all-digital HDMI connection. All the video modes that work on component are supported on HDMI, which means up to 60fps at 720p/1080i, but you can additionally stretch up to true 1080p capture at 30fps - and the digital picture means the picture is crisp and precise. Of course, that doesn't mean that the resulting video is always going to be crystal-clear, as the the maximum bitrate the Game Capture HD Pro can produce (by hardware limitation) is 15mbps, which makes for some decent, but not amazing, video. What I did look out for was any discernible frame drops at the high end of the spectrum - both 720p at 60fps and 1080p at 30fps - and found very few issues as long as the capture PC's CPU could keep up.
Pass-through
One last note is that the whole point of having the pass-through video for both component and HDMI is so that you can play games like you always have, but now you'll have a device permanently connected for easy, convenient recording. This works and you can actually have both the HDMI and component cables both connected for simultaneous passthrough for both (but recording on only one, obviously), but the only issue is that to do this, the GCHD Pro must stay powered up at all times through its USB cable. That can be a hassle for certain setups - say, a laptop in the living room while recording console footage - but what you can do is connect a cheap, self-powered USB hub to go between the GCHD Pro and the recording PC, and that will keep the device powered on even if you disconnect the USB cable from the PC. It's inelegant, but it works.
Bitrates and Encoding
The GCHD Pro internally encodes all video into the .m2ts file format using the H.264 video codec and AAC audio codec. You can't change that on the hardware level or have it spit out any kind of raw or uncompressed video as the USB 2.0 interface wouldn't be able to handle HD video in super-high bandwidth formats. What it does supply is just fine for stream quality or YouTube, but if you are wanting to play with lossless capture or are considering tweaking a selection of codecs for precise capture quality, you should definitely not be looking at the Game Capture HD Pro (or, for that matter, anything with a USB 2.0 interface, as they all have similar hardware-based limitations). It's important to point out that this limitation is forced by the USB interface; there's nothing Roxio could have done to make this work short of sending the video in raw format and moving up to USB 3.0, but there are still so few computers with reliable USB 3.0 ports on them and then Roxio (and the user!) would be forced to deal with Windows' own codec issues on top of that.
Locked to Roxio's Software
As is with all of these USB-based capture devices, the GCHD Pro's hardware is inextricably tied to the software, so what that means is that currently, there is no other software that actually works directly with this device. As you can imagine, that means that this product lives or dies based on the quality of the software that ships with the product, and for me, it's generally better than I expected, but it's also been a bit of a challenge dealing with it. Maybe it's because I really enjoy the prospect of using whatever software I want - Dxtory, AmarecTV, Xsplit, even VirtualDub - but Roxio's own software certainly has its own learning curve, and it comes with a few limitations and issues.
Can these problems be worked around? Some of them, definitely. For example, I hope that you're alright with sending the captured video over to Roxio's own built-in editor, Videowave, because I found that the particular brand of .m2ts format it encodes can give other video editors problems. And if you want to livestream, I hope that you want to use that same Roxio capture program to stream on Twitch.tv only, because that's the only streaming site it actually supports. More on streaming later; for now, let's get into how editing works.
Editing Video
Roxio's Videowave suite that sits alongside the capture software is much better than I expected to get as a pack-in tool. It's got a full timeline editor you can use along with some basic effects and transitions you can employ, and while its choice of codecs and file formats for the final product feels just a tad limited, it certainly makes perfectly usable videos. If you're not used to a full timeline-based editor and have stuck with basic stuff like the video editing suites built into Windows, it might take some getting used to, but it's worth learning it as that's how "real" editing software works. What I do appreciate is the support for nVidia CUDA and ATI Stream Tech for GPU-based acceleration in the final encode, but unfortunately, I couldn't get the ATI hardware support working on a Radeon HD4850. CUDA worked just fine for me on a couple of different nVidia cards, though - a GeForce 660Ti in one machine and an old 8800GT in another - and it definitely helped speed up the encode.
You can add audio commentary to your recorded videos here, toss in background music if you like, split the video into pieces for easy trimming, and then add effects and transitions. Some of these functions aren't quite as slick or easy to use as what we get in other, more expensive software out there, but it's doable. Here's an example: when capturing PC video, I incur a roughly 300ms desync between recorded audio and video because I use third-party software called Virtual Audio Cable on the gaming PC to also output game sound to my speakers simultaneously when playing. It's possible to fix this problem in Videowave by way of exporting the audio and re-adding it as a separate track so I can skew it towards the right spot, but it's not really intuitive or easy to do these basic things. Still, it beats spending $500 on Sony Vegas.
Once you've got your video all set up the way you want, you can save the "production" file separately, then export the video to a file with a choice of formats, including Windows Media 9, various H.264-based formats like AVCHD, presets for Apple devices, and more. You can make lower-bandwidth videos with reduced quality, and on the high end, the 15mbps that the GCHD Pro is actually recording in is the maximum output - so don't expect to get impeccable archival-quality video as a final product, as the device is incapable of spitting it out in the first place. The video is just fine for recording some solid-looking HD gameplay, but if you're capturing something you want to look amazing for years to come, look elsewhere.
You've also got the choice, instead of saving to a file, to upload the video directly to Facebook or YouTube. I didn't have any issues with the Facebook posting, but the YouTube posting goes through the standard YouTube API anyway, it appends a Roxio message in the description that you can't remove unless you go into your YouTube control panel and edit it yourself, and worst of all, it refused to upload in anything higher than 480p settings for me. I'm not sure if it was the particular videos I had made or what, but if you are looking at the GCHD Pro and are serious about your YouTube posts, you might want to save the video to your hard drive and do manual YouTube posting like you're probably already doing. It certainly takes more effort, time, and bandwidth to upload it that way, but for me, the final product looked much better.
Livestreaming
The most time you'll spend with this Roxio device is in the capture software itself, and if you are thinking of using the GCHD Pro to livestream, I've found that this device might not be worth the trouble. The software seems to be a little unreliable when streaming, as I found that if I also load my stream to see it live - something that the capture software launches in a browser automatically - that actually makes the stream drop tons of frames. That can happen at any of the four qualities that are supported: 240p, 360p, 480p, and 720p, each with their own bitrates that max at 1.5mbps at 720p. I spent several hours dealing with this issue, but with 5mbps upload and after confirming that I wasn't hitting bottlenecks with CPU, RAM, upload or download speeds, I couldn't find a resolution other than to simply not load my live stream on a browser; I trust that my stream was running fine. (This is not something I see a lot of streamers really resigning themselves to do.) Streaming in 720p at similar bitrates worked fine in software like XSplit, FFSplit, and Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder, so all I can do is lay the blame on the Roxio chain of hardware and software.
Even if you're sure you won't be hitting any bottlenecks, the process of livestreaming from this device is rather inefficient; the box always encodes in its particular format and sends it to your PC over USB, then your PC has to decode it from that format and then re-encode it in the format that Twitch.tv accepts. If that seems a little silly, well, it is, but again that's a side effect of the limitation we get when using a USB interface. There are ways to set up third-party streaming software like XSplit to directly capture right off of the Roxio software's window, but I found that the video quality takes a huge hit, lots of frames are lost, and the audio tends to desync, so I don't really call that a solution at all. There's a possibility that XSplit may eventually add direct support for this Roxio device, but it'll have to be for this box specifically, and there are plenty of other competitors to this device - ones that have been out for longer - that still have no support.
Roxio's capture software does include the ability to plug in a mic and mix in live input from that so you can livestream with an attached microphone, but there's currently no way to also take in video from any other sources - like a webcam - and place it on the video image. If you're a serious streamer with a paid version of XSplit and such, then the GCHD Pro is probably not going to meet your needs - and that's even if they get the livestreaming issues worked out.
A casual stream might be fine, but does all of this add up to a working solution for someone that's planning on using Roxio's hardware to spend many hours streaming? Not really, and I really hope that Roxio's software team can continue to work on making their streaming solution more efficient and reliable. If you've got followers and expectations to meet when you're live on Twitch.tv, you might want to stick with straight-up XSplit for PC streaming and possibly more flexible, non-USB hardware for streaming console footage.
Performance
While the Roxio device does encode directly, it should be pointed out that when you're capturing video, there's still a significant chunk of your PC's performance that's being eaten up by the software. It's almost all CPU in this case, although I found that even if you have CPU power to spare, the act of writing video to disk still puts a burden on the machine to the point that you really shouldn't be doing anything else on it if you're capturing on an older or slower machine. Still, you can capture at 720p 60fps or 1080p 30fps on a relatively weak dual-core CPU - like an old Core 2 Duo or a slower Core i3 chip - just fine. For some reason, the Roxio capture software can eat more CPU when it's not recording than when it is, and in the first few seconds of capture on a slower machine, you might see some frame drops which manifest as very ugly artifacts in the final video. If you're cutting it close on the CPU power, make sure you start capturing a good ten seconds or so before you want anything captured to actually look good.
But that's direct capture and recording; livestreaming is something else entirely. This adds an additional burden that a weak CPU might not be able to handle, so massive frame drops might start to happen if it can't keep up; in general, I would recommend something with a really fast dual-core CPU or pretty much any quad-core CPU if you want to livestream in HD. It's unfortunate that only Roxio's video editing suite supports ATI Stream and Nvidia CUDA tech, as it'd be nice to have GPU assistance in getting real-time livestreaming running, but unfortunately there's no support for that yet. I'm not sure if any other competitor's products support that, but it seems unlikely, as livestreaming is such a new thing anyway.
Capturing PC gameplay
I played around a bit with capturing both PC footage, and you can definitely use this to capture PC gameplay but it needs to be used a certain way to make it worth it. The first thing to be said is that the whole point of using this on PC is to offload the capture and encode duties to another PC so that your gaming machine is running at full speed without issues or slowdowns; if you're not sending the video to another machine, then just use your current capture or streaming software to directly record your footage right from the PC you're playing on, as they will wind up being more efficient.
Now that we've got that out of the way, let's come to setting things up. The HDMI passthrough on the GCHD Pro works fine as long as the box has power over the USB port, but many monitors wash out or ruin a PC image when it comes in over HDMI rather than DVI, so you might want to come up with a different solution - like using both a DVI and HDMI port on your video card simultaneously, with the control panel setting the DVI to your PC monitor as the primary display and the HDMI output to the Roxio box as a mirror.
On top of this, if you want to both hear and capture sound simultaneously when capturing PC footage, you've got to play around with things and install third-party software to make it work right. See, the issue you'll find is that you need to set Windows to send the sound output through the HDMI cable, but even if you feed the sound from your capture machine back through your speakers, it's on a good two-second delay. To me, that's not really acceptable. You can use a program called Virtual Audio Cable to force Windows to directly output sound from one game to two hardware devices simultaneously - like the HDMI port for the Roxio box and your soundcard for standard speakers - but the VAC software costs at least $25, and then you may get an audio desync as a result which has to be fixed in a different video editor since Roxio's own editor doesn't have that feature. Ouch!
With all of that said, is the Game Capture HD Pro good for snagging PC gameplay? Well, yes, but there are limitations, pitfalls, and extra effort required. That make it sound like the ease of use that Roxio is offering suddenly falls apart, but I don't see how capturing PC gameplay with a second machine gets any easier with any other product anyway. Roxio gets it done, if only just barely, although all of the issues I mentioned - issues with livestreaming, inability to mix in webcams, possible desyncs, and the like - still apply.
A Great Starting Off Point
So, is the Roxio Game Capture HD Pro worth your money? It is definitely worth it if you want an easy-to-use, all-in-one solution for capturing, but I do think that as of this writing, you're better off finding a different solution if your main goal is livestreaming. What I do really appreciate is the value that the software offers, as it goes beyond the very basic editors out there, and offers plenty for consumer-level editing and production. Can you do produce better looking video and livestreams with a dedicated PCI-E capture card and some $500 video editing software? Certainly, but Roxio is coming in with a product that is easy to use and includes true 1080p capture support, compatibility with a wide range of PCs and laptops, and generally solid software all in one package that is at a $150 MSRP. You may be able to find HDMI capture devices for less money, but their software will be worse, they may not support true 1080p, they'll likely be more difficult to set up, and may need a dedicated PCI-E slot in a desktop PC to work. So even though there are some rather annoying downsides and frustrations, I can definitely recommend this device as a starting point for someone who wants to get into capturing gameplay, and maybe livestreaming it if they've got some patience and maybe a little faith that Roxio can keep at work on their software. Serious streamers and YouTubers should probably stick with what they have, but for the rest of us, Roxio's Game Capture HD Pro is pretty great.
Want to see a sample of the kinds of videos the GCHD Pro can make? See some Borderlands 2 1080p PC action on YouTube or download the (large) final .MP4 file. Console? Here's a bit of 720p Forza 4 footage on YouTube, stuck at 30fps or as a 60fps direct download. Would you rather see a very recent game? Check out some Forza Horizon footage on YouTube or as a direct download. And to see some component video-based footage from the PS3, here's Gran Turismo 5 at YouTube or as a direct download (at 60fps), King of Fighters XIII on YouTube or as direct download, and since it's a 30fps game anyway, Just Cause 2 just on YouTube. All videos were captured and edited on an Alienware M11X laptop with some rather modest hardware: a Core 2 Duo CPU at 1.6GHz, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a GeForce 335M, and Windows 7 x64.
Disclaimer: This review is based on a retail product sent to us by Roxio for review.
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