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Product Description
From the Manufacturer
Elgato Video Capture
Elgato video captures are ready for iPad, iMovie, Windows Live Movie Maker, and YouTube
Every step is made simple. View larger
Need an easy way to transfer home video from VHS, Video8, or Hi8 tapes to your Mac or PC? Or to transfer saved movies and TV shows from your DVR to your iTunes or Windows Media Player library? The Elgato Video Capture records video from any analog video source including a VCR, set-top box, camcorder, DVD player, and more.
There is no easier or more convenient way to transfer home video to your computer
Turn Analog Into Digital
There is no easier or more convenient way to transfer home video to your computer. Elgato Video Capture records from analog video sources in the H.264 or MPEG-4 formats that are native to iTunes. Your video is captured in real-time and no lengthy re-encoding is necessary; the video is immediately ready to sync with an iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV, to play in QuickTime, to edit in iMovie, or to upload directly to YouTube.
Put Family Memories on Your Computer
The era of VHS tapes is winding down, and after three decades there is a lot of video content to transfer for modern playback devices. What's more, any video stored on magnetic tape (such as VHS, Video8 and Hi8) has a limited life span and deteriorates over time. The Elgato Video Capture provides an easy way to bring those precious memories into iTunes or your Windows Media Player library.
Every Step Is Made Simple
The Elgato Video Capture is very easy to use. The software assistant guides you through every step, from connecting an analog video device to capturing video and choosing how you will watch and share it. The software offers a simple tool to trim the beginning and end of the captured video. With just one click, you can add your video to iTunes or to your Windows Media Player library; you can play back the video on your computer or sync it with your iPad or iPhone; you can upload your video directly to YouTube; and you can edit it right away in iMovie or Windows Live Movie Maker.
World-Ready for Any Device and Region
The Elgato Video Capture features composite and S-Video inputs and comes with a composite video/RCA stereo cable and SCART adapter. It handles standard definition NTSC, SECAM, PAL and PAL/60 video for all regions.
What's in the Box?
- Elgato Video Capture Hardware
- Elgato Video Capture software for Mac and Windows (CD-ROM)
- Composite-to-SCART adapter
- Composite video/ RCA stereo cable
- User manual
- Warranty
System Requirements
- Macintosh: Intel Core processor, Mac OS X v10.5.8 or later
- PC: Windows 7, 2.0 GHz Intel/AMD CPU or Intel Atom CPU
- 1 GB RAM
- Available USB 2.0 port
Product Description
Transfer video from a VCR, DVR, set-top box, camcorder or any other analog video source to your Mac as an iTunes-ready file. The easy-to-use software guides you through each step, from connecting an analog video source, to capturing video, to choosing how you will watch and share it. One simple click adds your captured video to iTunes to sync with an iPod, iPhone and Apple TV, plays it in QuickTime, or uploads it directly to YouTube. You can also edit your video right away in iMovie. Elgato Video Capture features composite and S-Video inputs which enables you to connect any analog video device to your Mac, and comes with a SCART adapter. Elgato Video Capture handles NTSC, SECAM, PAL, and PAL/60 video and records in iTunes-ready, high quality H.264 or MPEG-4 files. Select between 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios to match the source video for optimal playback quality. After capturing you can edit your video right away in iMovie
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
325 of 331 people found the following review helpful
I read the reviews here and went ahead with my purchase anyway. I'm glad I did.
It couldn't be any more simple to record from an analog source to the Mac. My project is converting some old VHS home movies to digital videos. I wanted to try a test before I jumped into the real projects, so I decided to encode a small section of a VHS tape purchased around 1992.
I popped the software disc into my laptop and it installed in a few minutes. When finished, I launched the application and it presented me with a screen to test the video signal. I plugged in both ends of the device and I saw what was playing on my VCR instantly. The next screen made sure I had audio. Once set-up was out of the way, it was off to the races. I tested with a 10 minute section of the video and the software stopped recording exactly when I told it to.
I wanted to address the "issue" the other reviewers mistakenly have with this product not outputting H.264. The first video I captured has a file extension of ".mp4" and the description is "MPEG-4 Movie" in Finder. When I right-clicked and chose Get Info on the file, under Codecs, I see H.264, AAC listed. This proves H.264 encoding works with this product. I request the reviewers who said this is not working do the same and report the results.
Bottom line, this is a very simple to use product and I am looking forward to using it to convert those old movies from VHS. MUST BUY.
It couldn't be any more simple to record from an analog source to the Mac. My project is converting some old VHS home movies to digital videos. I wanted to try a test before I jumped into the real projects, so I decided to encode a small section of a VHS tape purchased around 1992.
I popped the software disc into my laptop and it installed in a few minutes. When finished, I launched the application and it presented me with a screen to test the video signal. I plugged in both ends of the device and I saw what was playing on my VCR instantly. The next screen made sure I had audio. Once set-up was out of the way, it was off to the races. I tested with a 10 minute section of the video and the software stopped recording exactly when I told it to.
I wanted to address the "issue" the other reviewers mistakenly have with this product not outputting H.264. The first video I captured has a file extension of ".mp4" and the description is "MPEG-4 Movie" in Finder. When I right-clicked and chose Get Info on the file, under Codecs, I see H.264, AAC listed. This proves H.264 encoding works with this product. I request the reviewers who said this is not working do the same and report the results.
Bottom line, this is a very simple to use product and I am looking forward to using it to convert those old movies from VHS. MUST BUY.
205 of 207 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Works great with Windows 7, plus a comparison with competing products
April 2, 2012
Amazon Verified Purchase
My apologies for this long review. Hopefully, though, it will be useful to someone.
I've spent some time the past 2 weeks comparing competing products for transferring home videos into digital format on my Windows 7 PC for long-term preservation and so that I can edit the videos on my PC. I tried or considered three different products including this Elgato Video Capture, and one high-end video transfer company, all on the same Hi8 analog video cassette with a family video that is 15 years old. Along the way, I have gotten some familiarity with the various technologies available today for transferring magnetic tapes into digital form. I found out some interesting things, and thought I would share them, in the hope that it might help others.
First, and you probably already know this, if you have any video memories on magnetic video tape, you want to get them transferred into digital form onto your PC or DVD or Blu-ray as soon as possible, before the video badly deteriorates. This especially includes regular VHS tapes, Video8 tapes, and normal Hi8 tapes, all of which are analog formats and are particularly susceptible to deterioration starting after about 10 years. Somewhat less susceptible to deterioration are Digital8 (which is also recorded on Hi8 tapes) and MiniDV tapes, because those are digital formats. But even for digital tapes, it is still magnetic tape which deteriorates over time, and you need to get those videos off of there. Seriously, at the risk of sounding like a doomsayer, if you have precious memories on magnetic video tape, you need to transfer that video off of those tapes and into digital form as soon as possible, or risk losing them forever. It's not hard to do, and you'll sleep better at night when you get it done!
In my case, I have a bunch of precious Hi8 family video tapes recorded on a high-end Sony consumer camcorder between 10 and 19 years ago, and I am rescuing these Hi8 videos a little on the late side. I wish I had started this project 5 years ago instead. These tapes are still watchable, but they have developed some lines and drop-outs and "hiccups" and digital artifacts. With multiple playback retries, I can fortunately still coax out fairly high quality from these tapes.
A quick note: Digital8 and MiniDV video tape camcorders have USB ports on them for digitally transferring your videos to your PC or Mac. If this is your situation, there is NO need to purchase one of these video transfer products (like Elgato Video Capture). You will get the best quality, by far, by using a USB cable to connect your camcorder to your PC or Mac, playing back your video in the camcorder, and using any of a whole bunch of different inexpensive software products on the market that will allow you to capture video from the USB port on your computer. This way, you are getting the digital video in its original form, which is great. You will get worse quality if you use a video transfer product that captures the video off of the video ports on the camcorder, because the camcorder is converting the digital video into analog, then the video transfer product converts the analog back to digital (not ideal, for sure).
So, for the rest of this review, I will assume you have analog magnetic video tape (like VHS, Video8, or normal Hi8), in which case you need a video transfer product like this Elgato Video Capture or something similar.
A note about video resolution: The analog video tape formats (VHS, Video8, and normal Hi8) all have native video resolutions less than 640x480. All of the video transfer products on the market record the video from these formats at either 640x480 or 720x480. It doesn't really matter which of these two resolutions the product records at. The point is, all of the video transfer products record at higher resolution than the original video, so you are capturing all of the resolution of the original video when you do the video transfer, which is good.
A note about overscan lines at the bottom of captured video: As documented all over the Internet, when capturing digital video from an analog video source like an analog magnetic video tape, you will end up with some additional fuzzy lines at the bottom of the captured video. This is totally normal. When played back on a regular TV, these overscan lines are usually chopped off because they appear "below the bottom of the screen," but the digital capture grabs them. To get rid of those lines, you can crop or zoom in slightly when you do your video editing. Interestingly, this Elgato Video Capture device automatically does a minor zoom on all captured video to remove those fuzzy lines.
A remark about video editing: Two of the products below (Elgato and Hauppauge) produce video files that use H.264 compression. This is an excellent video compression standard for viewing, and is supported by just about all video editing software. However, if you are going to do significant video editing, you may want to use some video conversion software to convert these video files to uncompressed or MJPEG-compressed AVI or MOV files for editing. (There are many inexpensive or perhaps even free software packages that will do this conversion.) The problem with editing H.264 compressed video files directly is that the extreme compression, which crosses video frame boundaries, can cause problems for video editing software, resulting sometimes in digital artifacts or out-of-sync audio in the final edited video output. An uncompressed or MJPEG-compressed AVI or MOV video source file avoids these problems.
A word about using an outside company to make a high-quality transfer of your analog video tape: A search of the Internet reveals many companies that will transfer your video tape into digital form, and send the digital files back to you on a fairly inexpensive USB hard drive that you can supply yourself or that they will sell you. Some of these companies are better than others. A few of these companies are very high-end, using expensive video transfer equipment. I used one of these very high-end video transfer companies, using their most expensive Premium service, to transfer the very same 15-year-old Hi8 tape that I also tried at home with the video transfer products below. I discovered that the transfer done by the outside company was significantly WORSE (lots of lines through the video and tracking problems) than what I was able to do at home with the products below. I don't necessarily think this is the fault of the video transfer company. At home, I was able to use the very same Sony Hi8 camcorder to do the transfer that I originally used to shoot the original video tape. My suspicion is that, especially for older analog video tapes, it helps to use the same camcorder for transfer as you used to shoot the video originally, so that any idiosyncracies in tracking or video head alignment won't be as much of an issue. Just food for thought.
Anyway, as noted above, I have done an experiment over the past 2 weeks, transferring the exact same 15-year-old Hi8 tape to my PC using the high-end video transfer company (above), plus two different video transfer products at home (Elgato and Hauppauge, below), and I also considered a third video transfer product (Blackmagic, below), to compare the pros and cons of each of each approach. Here's what I found out:
Elgato Video Capture (this product): Gets the best reviews on Amazon for a relatively inexpensive product for video transfer on both Windows and Mac. It captures video at 640x480 resolution, which means it grabs the full resolution and more of VHS, Video8, and normal Hi8 tapes. This worked great on my 64-bit Windows 7 computer. I just downloaded the latest driver and software from the Elgato web site, installed them both, and I was ready to go. It's incredibly easy to use. It connects to any USB 2.0 port on your computer. There are really no settings; the software guides you through the very simple process, and it transfers your video to your computer as an MP4 file. In case you are curious, the MP4 file it writes uses H.264 compression at 640x480 resolution and (basically) 29.97 frames/sec (standard NTSC) and a video data rate of between about 1100 kbps and 1500 kbps, depending on the complexity of the particular video you transferred. The audio in the MP4 file is AAC format at 48 kHz 16-bit stereo with an audio data rate of 128 kbps. When capturing a 2-hour video, I ended up with an MP4 file that was 1.5 GB in size. This Elgato product scores big points for ease-of-use. However, the video quality, while quite good, is not as high as the Hauppauge HD PVR (see below), because of the heavy video compression the Elgato uses to make a relatively small MP4 file with fairly low data rates. If you look closely at the captured video from the Elgato product, you will notice some minor squares of slightly distorted color at times, where the video has been over-compressed. Also, as noted above, the Elgato Video Capture automatically does a minor zoom on all captured video to avoid the fuzzy lines at the bottom of the captured video. On the plus side, this saves you the step of doing that zoom yourself in video editing. On the minus side, it is cropping all 4 sides of the video slightly, which might not be what you want.
Hauppauge HD PVR: This product exists in two very similar versions, the Model 1212 and the Read more ›
I've spent some time the past 2 weeks comparing competing products for transferring home videos into digital format on my Windows 7 PC for long-term preservation and so that I can edit the videos on my PC. I tried or considered three different products including this Elgato Video Capture, and one high-end video transfer company, all on the same Hi8 analog video cassette with a family video that is 15 years old. Along the way, I have gotten some familiarity with the various technologies available today for transferring magnetic tapes into digital form. I found out some interesting things, and thought I would share them, in the hope that it might help others.
First, and you probably already know this, if you have any video memories on magnetic video tape, you want to get them transferred into digital form onto your PC or DVD or Blu-ray as soon as possible, before the video badly deteriorates. This especially includes regular VHS tapes, Video8 tapes, and normal Hi8 tapes, all of which are analog formats and are particularly susceptible to deterioration starting after about 10 years. Somewhat less susceptible to deterioration are Digital8 (which is also recorded on Hi8 tapes) and MiniDV tapes, because those are digital formats. But even for digital tapes, it is still magnetic tape which deteriorates over time, and you need to get those videos off of there. Seriously, at the risk of sounding like a doomsayer, if you have precious memories on magnetic video tape, you need to transfer that video off of those tapes and into digital form as soon as possible, or risk losing them forever. It's not hard to do, and you'll sleep better at night when you get it done!
In my case, I have a bunch of precious Hi8 family video tapes recorded on a high-end Sony consumer camcorder between 10 and 19 years ago, and I am rescuing these Hi8 videos a little on the late side. I wish I had started this project 5 years ago instead. These tapes are still watchable, but they have developed some lines and drop-outs and "hiccups" and digital artifacts. With multiple playback retries, I can fortunately still coax out fairly high quality from these tapes.
A quick note: Digital8 and MiniDV video tape camcorders have USB ports on them for digitally transferring your videos to your PC or Mac. If this is your situation, there is NO need to purchase one of these video transfer products (like Elgato Video Capture). You will get the best quality, by far, by using a USB cable to connect your camcorder to your PC or Mac, playing back your video in the camcorder, and using any of a whole bunch of different inexpensive software products on the market that will allow you to capture video from the USB port on your computer. This way, you are getting the digital video in its original form, which is great. You will get worse quality if you use a video transfer product that captures the video off of the video ports on the camcorder, because the camcorder is converting the digital video into analog, then the video transfer product converts the analog back to digital (not ideal, for sure).
So, for the rest of this review, I will assume you have analog magnetic video tape (like VHS, Video8, or normal Hi8), in which case you need a video transfer product like this Elgato Video Capture or something similar.
A note about video resolution: The analog video tape formats (VHS, Video8, and normal Hi8) all have native video resolutions less than 640x480. All of the video transfer products on the market record the video from these formats at either 640x480 or 720x480. It doesn't really matter which of these two resolutions the product records at. The point is, all of the video transfer products record at higher resolution than the original video, so you are capturing all of the resolution of the original video when you do the video transfer, which is good.
A note about overscan lines at the bottom of captured video: As documented all over the Internet, when capturing digital video from an analog video source like an analog magnetic video tape, you will end up with some additional fuzzy lines at the bottom of the captured video. This is totally normal. When played back on a regular TV, these overscan lines are usually chopped off because they appear "below the bottom of the screen," but the digital capture grabs them. To get rid of those lines, you can crop or zoom in slightly when you do your video editing. Interestingly, this Elgato Video Capture device automatically does a minor zoom on all captured video to remove those fuzzy lines.
A remark about video editing: Two of the products below (Elgato and Hauppauge) produce video files that use H.264 compression. This is an excellent video compression standard for viewing, and is supported by just about all video editing software. However, if you are going to do significant video editing, you may want to use some video conversion software to convert these video files to uncompressed or MJPEG-compressed AVI or MOV files for editing. (There are many inexpensive or perhaps even free software packages that will do this conversion.) The problem with editing H.264 compressed video files directly is that the extreme compression, which crosses video frame boundaries, can cause problems for video editing software, resulting sometimes in digital artifacts or out-of-sync audio in the final edited video output. An uncompressed or MJPEG-compressed AVI or MOV video source file avoids these problems.
A word about using an outside company to make a high-quality transfer of your analog video tape: A search of the Internet reveals many companies that will transfer your video tape into digital form, and send the digital files back to you on a fairly inexpensive USB hard drive that you can supply yourself or that they will sell you. Some of these companies are better than others. A few of these companies are very high-end, using expensive video transfer equipment. I used one of these very high-end video transfer companies, using their most expensive Premium service, to transfer the very same 15-year-old Hi8 tape that I also tried at home with the video transfer products below. I discovered that the transfer done by the outside company was significantly WORSE (lots of lines through the video and tracking problems) than what I was able to do at home with the products below. I don't necessarily think this is the fault of the video transfer company. At home, I was able to use the very same Sony Hi8 camcorder to do the transfer that I originally used to shoot the original video tape. My suspicion is that, especially for older analog video tapes, it helps to use the same camcorder for transfer as you used to shoot the video originally, so that any idiosyncracies in tracking or video head alignment won't be as much of an issue. Just food for thought.
Anyway, as noted above, I have done an experiment over the past 2 weeks, transferring the exact same 15-year-old Hi8 tape to my PC using the high-end video transfer company (above), plus two different video transfer products at home (Elgato and Hauppauge, below), and I also considered a third video transfer product (Blackmagic, below), to compare the pros and cons of each of each approach. Here's what I found out:
Elgato Video Capture (this product): Gets the best reviews on Amazon for a relatively inexpensive product for video transfer on both Windows and Mac. It captures video at 640x480 resolution, which means it grabs the full resolution and more of VHS, Video8, and normal Hi8 tapes. This worked great on my 64-bit Windows 7 computer. I just downloaded the latest driver and software from the Elgato web site, installed them both, and I was ready to go. It's incredibly easy to use. It connects to any USB 2.0 port on your computer. There are really no settings; the software guides you through the very simple process, and it transfers your video to your computer as an MP4 file. In case you are curious, the MP4 file it writes uses H.264 compression at 640x480 resolution and (basically) 29.97 frames/sec (standard NTSC) and a video data rate of between about 1100 kbps and 1500 kbps, depending on the complexity of the particular video you transferred. The audio in the MP4 file is AAC format at 48 kHz 16-bit stereo with an audio data rate of 128 kbps. When capturing a 2-hour video, I ended up with an MP4 file that was 1.5 GB in size. This Elgato product scores big points for ease-of-use. However, the video quality, while quite good, is not as high as the Hauppauge HD PVR (see below), because of the heavy video compression the Elgato uses to make a relatively small MP4 file with fairly low data rates. If you look closely at the captured video from the Elgato product, you will notice some minor squares of slightly distorted color at times, where the video has been over-compressed. Also, as noted above, the Elgato Video Capture automatically does a minor zoom on all captured video to avoid the fuzzy lines at the bottom of the captured video. On the plus side, this saves you the step of doing that zoom yourself in video editing. On the minus side, it is cropping all 4 sides of the video slightly, which might not be what you want.
Hauppauge HD PVR: This product exists in two very similar versions, the Model 1212 and the Read more ›
120 of 122 people found the following review helpful
Amazon Verified Purchase
|
Length:
3:38
Mins
If you are like us you probably have hours and hours of home movies that are slowly decaying on VHS tape. In the ideal world I would have all of our home movies on my computer where they can be made into DVDs or sent to a media player (I am using Apple TV with 160GB Hard Drive - MB189LL/A since it works seamlessly with my Mac). I happy to report that the Elgato helps to solve the problem of how I am going to get this media into my computer. I will say that there are other options such as buying a VHS/DVD recorder and then using software such as Handbrake to rip the content off of the DVD. I am sure there are others ways too... but using the Elgato Video Capture was the choice I used.
Pros-
- Easy set-up (less than 5 minutes)
- Cost effective
- Works for all media types - if it has a RCA or S-Video output you are in business - This includes a my mini-DVD video camera, Slngbox, DVR, or your TV
- Will record directly from your Tivo (see above)
- I didn't have any of the problems with the video/audio syncing
- Works perfectly with a Mac (PC users have other choices)
- Will publish directly to YouTube and ITunes
Final Verdict - Works perfectly for me and I couldn't be happier!
Pros-
- Easy set-up (less than 5 minutes)
- Cost effective
- Works for all media types - if it has a RCA or S-Video output you are in business - This includes a my mini-DVD video camera, Slngbox, DVR, or your TV
- Will record directly from your Tivo (see above)
- I didn't have any of the problems with the video/audio syncing
- Works perfectly with a Mac (PC users have other choices)
- Will publish directly to YouTube and ITunes
Final Verdict - Works perfectly for me and I couldn't be happier!
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Works Beautifully!
Setup of hardware and installation of the software was very smooth and went off without a hitch on my 2012 Mac Mini. Read more
Published 7 days ago by tbra1n
4.0 out of 5 stars
Recommended
The product is in good condition. It serves the purpose why i bought it. I like the product very much.
Published 11 days ago by rebecca hipolito
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good Product
Works great and as expected to capture VHS analog video and convert to MP4 format. Software is simple and easy to operate. Read more
Published 11 days ago by penpourri
5.0 out of 5 stars
Elgato
I am very happy with my ítems. Is just it I need.
The image is very well. And easy.
Thank you
The image is very well. And easy.
Thank you
Published 12 days ago by Rafael
4.0 out of 5 stars
It works
I was looking for something that I can record some video off of my dvr. Initial setup was fairly easy although the software did not recognize the device until I unplugged and... Read more
Published 13 days ago by Qal
4.0 out of 5 stars
Works easily once you get updated drivers
Not quite plug and play -- you have to go manually to their website and upload the latest drivers. But once you do, the process of converting a video is intuitive and quite easy.
Published 14 days ago by Bukkene Bruse
2.0 out of 5 stars
less bad than most
Most products to digitize old tapes are terrible. This one is merely bad. It sometimes works, its video quality isn't that much worse than the tapes themselves, and it usually only... Read more
Published 16 days ago by R. Miller
4.0 out of 5 stars
GREAT! Super easy setup for Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.
Great product! Would definitely recommend and purchase again!
I chose this product to convert and save my old VHS movies because it works on Windows 7 Home Premium 64... Read more
I chose this product to convert and save my old VHS movies because it works on Windows 7 Home Premium 64... Read more
Published 18 days ago by B. G. CLEVELAND
5.0 out of 5 stars
Works better than expected
Got this to transfer my old VHS family videos to digital format and worked like a charm. Reasonable price and worth every cent
Published 19 days ago by Stephen H. Loizeaux
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great option for Mac - Worth the slightly higher price
The Elgato Video Capture Device is one of those rare products that actually does what it claims to do. Read more
Published 20 days ago by Casi Dougal
