Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 stars"The Sunk Cost Fallacy"
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 22, 2021
TL;DR: If you don't get hit by quality control issues, this card's not bad...But the out of the box performance is fairly poor,(Any fast motion on the screen blurs everything), and even minor problems will require HOURS to fix, as if you need help, support is hard to get.
And when you add in my first card being DOA, and the encoding glitches I had with the software, I don't think it was worth the effort.
But if you're the kinda person who just want to plug something in, and hit play, and you're not picky about image quality, this will be usable!
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I'm not a big streamer, nor am I a pro gamer, but I do enjoy recording gameplay at time.
I recently build (fairly decent) a brand-new PC, with a AMD 3600x, and rtx 2600s gpu, loaded with SSD's and it records PC games great!
So I just wanted something that could record console games as well, I had some issues with Elgato's software in the past, so I decided to give avermedia a chance!
I saw some bad video reviews online, but I heard some of them had been fixed! so I paid $135 and waited for it to arrive!
It showed up the next day!...dead!... Plugged it in, and the pc, no lights, not detected by the software, I tried multiple PC's... NO LUCK! Even the 'record button' on the device was broken
I should have just returned it, and gone for a different model/brand, But I really liked the Idea of PC-free recording, and it supported 480i even the new elgato cards don't! So I ordered a replacement. (Amazon made the return super easy!)
The new one arrived, and worked out of the box, it lit up, and showed up in the software, so I made sure everything was up to date, and started recording!
The first thing I noticed was how soft the image looked, so adjusted the record settings to the highest preset, called 'optimal', The image quality improved, but any time there was motion on the screen, it was filled with blur to the point where it was hard to make out moving objects.
Again, that should have been enough to send the card back, but instead, I reached out to avermedia support, I tried their support page, their support twitter account, and asked on their subreddit, I mainly asked about how to improve the image quality overall.
After almost 5 days of waiting, I finally got a rep's response on how to improve the image quality. word-for-word, it said: "we cannot improve the video quality. If you want to get higher video quality, please choose our device GC553/ GC573/GC551 they belong to software decoding."
Their solution was to just buy a more expensive capture card, and to a point that makes sense, the higher end cards will generally look better, but I'm not looking for top of the line quality, but something actually watchable.
But, turns out the highest preset only allows recording up to around 20mbps(auto adjusted bitrate), that should be more than enough for 1080p60, but it's not the maximum the card/software support, so I decided to try making my own preset.
After all this, I still was dedicated to sticking with the card, the software gave me no information on what a better recording setting would be, so I look up some specs online, and found that 60mbps may give me the best quality from this card, I also set the quality to 'high' and tweaked a few other settings.
And with some work, I was able to get MUCH cleaner recordings! (not sure why avermeida support did not recommend this.) Simply increasing the bitrate cleared up the blur, and made even free-frames look much more presentable!
But, this is where I learned, how avermedia's software is significantly WORSE than elgato's! your codec is locked by your video card, only MP4 recording (h.264/h.265). no hevc high support, Autio bit rated capped at 192kbps, ONLY Constant bitrate options, no auto for manaul profiles? and no slider for video bitrate? (enter it manually, or use arrows)
I get it, you don't want to overwhelm your customers with options, but when your presets are bad, and you don't give enough settings to fix them, then everyone loses!
PC-free mode, caps out at about 1500kbps, (probably a limitation of the hardware) and records to MOV format, I'm not sure what form of hardware encoding is used but it could be better. And if the capture card doesn't like your SD card, there's no way to find out why, it just lights up red, and you gotta reformat or try a new card I guess?
So after spending hours getting everything up and running it seemed to be working, The recording turned out much smoother, but when I brought it into my recording software, I started to notice some visual glitches in my recordings!
I saw a few before, but I figured it was VLC freaking out when scrubbing through high bittrate mp4's..NOPE! Avermedia's software had ruined sections of my recording!
This should have been the last straw, but I again kept trying to get the card to work,
I decided to try using OBS for the recording instead, I used that for all My PC games and never had any problems, and on their website, they listed it as compatible, so I figured it was worth a shot!
The first problem I ran into was that avermedia’s documentation on how to set up the card using their ‘stream engine’ was out of date, it was showing features that even their own software no longer supported.
I eventually got it working, and cranked up the bitrate, and I was able to record without the massive encoding glitches, recording directly from the card lead to a few dropped frame (from the capture card, not due to OBS) But using streamengine allowed for smoother recordings.
With either Option in OBS Some Blur is still added to motion, due to the capture card’s hardware decoder, but it’s still much better than the visual glitches recentral 4 gave me.
Also, if you're looking to record 480i content from an HDMI enabled xbox/gamecube/ps2, you should know this will accept the signal, but it will not pass an interlaced signal to your PC, instead, you'll get 480p,I believe they just combine or duplicate the extra frames, and you can't change the setting,(even with OBS) so the resulting image may look less smooth than on your TV.
So at the end of the day, I can’t even use the software made for the card, and based on the OBS recording, it seems like the main issue with the video quality is the encoding chip on the card.
The card is USABLE, that why I’m not giving it 1/5 stars, but I’m seriously considering returning it, as even for the price, the quality could be better, and as avermedia said, the only solution would be a better capture card.
But after all this work, and lackluster support, if I do upgrade this card, I won’t be buying another from avermedia.
