Customer Reviews

KWorld USB 2.0 Expert Video DVD Maker KW-USB2800D

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

Once a guy told me, " You have to be smarter than what you're working on." That applies in this case. One reviewer said no audio. True. Apparently you can't monitor the sound during capture. One reviewer said the sound was AWFUL! So I capured a test video for one minute and then played it back. The sound WAS awful. Then I checked the audio volume level (line in) and it was at maximum. No wonder the sound was awful. After a few more test captures, I had the line in volume down to around two or three. Now the playback sound was AWESOME!

This product works good. I gave four stars because you can't monitor the sound. Oh, one more point I forgot. I had an older Video camera that was not stereo and the sound on playback came out of only one speaker. So using the words of wisdom from the beginning of this review, I plugged the camera into my VCR and then into the USB2800. Voila! The VCR took the mono signal from the camera and routed it to both outputs. I now had sound coming from both speakers, although it is not true stereo.

I guess the moral of the story is "Don't be too quick to judge the equipment, for the fault may be your own." Two thumbs up!

I was initially skeptical about this product because of it simple look and comparitively low price. I however went ahead based on the reviews I read. The video quality was poor and i couldn't get a resolution higher the about 320x3??. This was because I was using a 1000MHz PIII Intel processor, USB 1.1 connection with 256MB. I installed the device on another computer (installation is a breeze), with a 2.8GHz PIV Intel Processor, USB 2.0 connection and 512Mb memory and the picture was crystal clear, just like the VHS I was copying from. I used the software that came with the device, namely Ulead DVD Movie Factory 4. This device also works with Windows movie maker, and Nero, It even comes with PVR software. I ripped a movie that was 720x??? (This is great resolution). There are options of AVI, MPEG, DVD, VCD, SVCD formats for encoding.
In short the device works great, but don't use with an old PC like I did.
This is highly recommended!!

I have used this product for a few days and so far no problems. Hardware worked without any problems. Picture qualify of the captured video is awesome. I did not give 5 stars because of the software. Software is not so user friendly or intuitive and lacks editing functionality. I do not even use the bundled software to capture video - instead used Movie Maker and/or ArcSoft ShowBiz DVD.

So far, I used it only with Sony Hi8 camcorder. Planning on using it with VCR to convert VHS to DVD.

All I wanted to do was to be able to transfer some old garbage from some video tapes onto my PC. This works great! It has the hookups for either the old-school red-yellow-white connectors, as well as an s-video hookup. The input to your PC is a usb port as well as a microphone/line-in plug. The included software isn't pretty, but it works great. In less than 5 minutes you'll be recording garbage onto your pc! The video quality is EXCELLENT and you have a number of choices for quality, screen size, video format, etc. It's perfect. Great item. Highly recommend it!

I searched long and hard for an inexpensive external video capture device to record movies from my DVR and other analog sources. I took a leap of faith with a product brand I had never heard of and with some mixed reviews. I honestly was expecting the worst. But I was pleasantly surprised. Installation was simple, just follow the very basic instructions. First I used windows Movie Maker using the setting for playback on lan 2.1 mbps, that didn't work, the video was choppy and missing frames. Next I used the Nero suite, which has the added benefit of keeping track of missing frames. The .AVI format when capturing was losing too many frames (Nero keeps a running counter of frames captured and lost.) I switched to MPEG 2, and it only lost the first 5 frames and then the rest was fine, I saved the captured file to my computer and then used Nero to burn to DVD and it took about 4 hrs, but when I played the movie back I noticed the audio wasn't synched up with the video, it was minor but enough to be annoying. Needless to say I was a little depressed. Finally I decided to give the CyberLink Power Producer (one of the included software suites), this time I used the "burn direct to disc" feature. I have a Dell Inspiron 1405E Core Duo processor, and my DVD burner is an external USB 2.0 Samsung. I captured video directly from my satellite receiver using the composite cables and the high-quality setting, it gave me around 1:05hrs for a 4.7GB DVD-R disc, when the recording was finished the writing process took less than 5 minutes. I popped out the disc and played it back on an Original XBOX, a Zenith portable and played back on my computer, the audio was perfectly synced and the video was of very good quality. I am very happy. I'm going to play around with some other settings and configurations, but as of right now I'm very satisfied with this product considering the low cost.

The Cons, the instructions are minimal for both the hardware and software, but I think normal users shouldn't have a problem, and yes the button on the device doesn't seem to do anything but I don't really care.

Hope this helps, I spent a good 2-3 weeks wracking my head over which product to buy. Remember, the capture device is only one element of the video transfer process, you should be willing to make coasters out of 3-5 DVDs, and to make sure that your cables, DVD players, and other components aren't the problem, before you give up on this product

Installed, brought up, activated, crashed operating system (XP)hard requiring forced turnoff and restart of computer. Got no satisfaction at all from support. after multiple times that they told me to reinstall(every communication told me this) which I did even though I informed them that this was of no value. Sent them everything they asked for and after the last go round they just stopped communicating (nearly 2 months now). I STRONGLY RECOMMEND NOT TO PURCHASE this product.

"Product details indicate "Minimum system requirements: Microsoft Windows 2000 / XP." Evidently, even though this indicates "minimum" the device doesn't work properly on Vista.

It installs and captures video well but no audio was captured. After contacting the vendor I was told that it was not compatible with Vista.

I returned the item to Amazon who accepted it graciously and returned my total payment. I then purchased the One-Touch Video Capture device (Diamond Multimedia) from Amazon. It was about $10 cheaper and works great with Vista.

Unboxed, installed, up and running in minutes!
Picture quality was better than I expected!
Highly recommend the hardware.
Can't say much for the software as I am using something other than was shipped with it.
Using it on a Toshiba Notebook/Windows XP Media Edition and it works great!

Product does exactly what it is supposed to do: capture video (in my case from old VHS tapes) in digital format and then burn to DVD. The instructions are practically non-existent, but the device and software are fairly intuitive. When you plug in the audio jack, you'll need to tell Windows to treat it as a microphone and then set the software accordingly (a prior reviewer recommended using "line in", but that did not work for me). Don't pay any attention to the button or green light on the device - just plug it in, open the "Producer" software, click a few settings, click on "Capture", start the VCR, and click on record. There's not much more to it than that, but if you want to do some editing, add menus, chapters, you'll need to play around a bit to figure it out as there are no instructions. This device works great, unlike the ADS DVD Express I tried previously, which didn't work at all. I'm using a Dell Inspiron laptop with only a 30G hard drive, 1G RAM, clock speed 1.66 - so you don't need a top of the line computer to make this work. I'm capturing to an external 500G hard drive.

I ordered this product to convert my VHS tapes to DVDs after buying a new laptop with a writable DVD drive. After downloading the Vista driver available on KWorld's website, I continued to not be able to get the PVR-Plus function to work. Unfortunately, this is the element that converts the VHS into an mpeg format on the computer. While the other features did come up right away, this one wouldn't. After e-mailing KWorld directly I got a response 2 weeks later saying the PVR-Plus is not Vista compatible. However, I did try running the program in an XP-compatibility mode and was able to see the streaming, but now had poor audio feed. I switched the audio setting from microphone to line-in but continued to get poor results. I ultimately had to return the product.