Customer Reviews

Studio Moviebox Plus USB2 Video Capture Device

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have to agree with the other 1 star user. This device falls very short on picture quality in all formats. The Pinnacle software that comes with this hardware is weak at best. I'm not saying it won't work. What I'm saying is it is very unstable and takes several attempts to get what you want. The worst part about each attempt is it may fail after 25 minutes into the video.
I have 3GB of 600Mhz RAM and a 256MB video card so it can't be starving for resources.
I would have returned it but I never got around to it. I'll be yanking my old video capture card and using it. I would recommend getting a capture card and using it for a better quality of video. My old capture card was very cheap but compared to this hardware it is night and day different. If you have bad vision and everything is blurry already this may be the device for you!!!! If they are precious memories your looking to backup then steer clear of this device.

this is tough for me to review as I haven't used any hardware/software like it. with that said, I found it easy to use (keep in mind I'm 37 and not real computer literate). most of the stuff I did was VCR to DVD and the quality was only good - likely due to the old tape and cheap VCR player. I'd buy it again.

I have been working with this product for months and have only gotten lousy video captures from it from several formats -- VHS, DVD, and laserdisc. This is not the first capture device I've used; I was very happy with my WinTV PVR until Mr. Bill Gates and his Windows Vista OS rendered that obsolete; so I have plenty of experience with such equipment. Yet after all this time and after talking to half of India and finding no workable setting or form of input, I am done with this rotten waste of money. One more item for the Vista scrapheap.

I am not familiart with other products like this, but this does what it says it will. The instructions are not too clear. There are several patches you must download to make it work with Windows Vista. Not real user friendly.

I've been playing around with various capture devices for several years and always had mixed results with products from Canopus, Avermedia and Hauppague. Discouraged, I set my VHS conversion projects on the back burner for a couple of years. About a year ago, I bought this Pinnacle box on impulse but set it on a shelf and never bothered to experiment with it until recently. The box originally came bundled with Pinnacle's Studio 11 software so I decided to upgrade to the present version of Studio (ver. 15) before tinkering with this box. To my delight, my first capture result was absolutely astonishing given my past experiences. Not a single dropped frame and the picture quality was every bit as clear and brilliant as the original tape! Subsequent captures from 8mm camcorder tapes resulted in perfect replication of the source material! The only reason I gave this product 4 stars rather than 5 is that ocassionally a capture will freeze and you have to rewind back to where the freeze took place and start a new capture. However, in such instances, I have to admit that the Studio 15 editor makes seamless splicing so easy that the frozen caps are just minor annoyances. The freezes are also probably my fault to begin with because I never bother to terminate all background tasks running when doing captures which just about every video capture mfr and guru recommends. I don't know if Pinnacle is still even selling this box or an updated version of it, but this one definitely gets the job done for me!

If you are trying to record video game footage, this is not the equipment for you. The Pinnacle software drops framerates and entire scenes from your shoot without discretion-even with med-high end computers to run it in. If you're trying to simply stream something, the third party recognizer does fine, but for an item to record and edit your video game footage into a "Let's Play" or Review, you should look elsewhere.

If you're looking for something to capture analog video, this is it. I haven't tried the software, but the unit works wonderfully. It captures VCR/ DVD whatever. It is analog, not digital, but works wonderfully. Would definitely buy one again. Software looks decent too.