Scrambled or blank screens had me flustered. I’ll admit to not reading the manual, but I thought the box was broken at first, while trying to capture footage of Ni no Kuni gameplay a few weeks back. You’ll have to settle for component-connected video, which caps out at 1080i. Simply put, the HD PVR 2 cannot record HDMI 1080p video from HDCP-protected devices like the PS3 and some Blu-ray players. The HD PVR records at rates up to 1080p from HDMI sources directly to your computer via USB 2.0 without breaking a sweat.īut! HDCP copy protection rears its ugly head when recording video output from the PlayStation 3. For about $160 (street price) you get HDMI and component inputs, perfect HDMI passthrough, on-board encoding with decent video quality, and some high-quality cabling to boot.

Hauppague’s newest, the HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition, solves all of the issues we had with its predecessor. If you’ve seen us fail a lot in our game footage, blame this box. The biggest issue with the HD PVR was that the component video passthrough feature had a delay, making the device unsuitable for capturing gameplay footage without looking like a terrible player. And while suitable, the video quality was always a bit lacking when compared to higher-end equipment. While nothing fancy, the on-board video encoder and USB 2.0 connectivity made the job easy.īut we’ve been missing HDMI connectivity lately. They worked fine for what they are - a reliable but inexpensive way to capture HD video to computer.

We’ve used Hauppauge’s HD PVR video recorder boxes here at Destructoid to capture game footage for the past couple of years. We’ve given one a full test run over the past couple of weeks. Now they’ve released an update with the HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition, which steps it up with HDMI connectivity, 1080p capture, and other handy features, perfect for grabbing game footage from consoles.

For less than $200 users could capture 1080i video easily. One of the most popular of these devices was Hauppague’s HD PVR video recorder, released about five or six years ago.

Taking the price down from thousands to hundreds for these boxes came right in time for the explosion of streaming and sharing video on the internet. But these past few years companies like Hauppague, Pinnacle, AVerMedia and others have released affordable boxes that let you capture footage directly to your computer for editing and saving. It used to cost ridiculous amounts of money to record video from other sources, especially in HD.

Hd pvr 2 software setup