Review on Avermedia MDVDEZUSB DVD EZMaker USB 2.0 📹 External Video Capture Device: High-Quality Video Capture Made Easy by Simon Nugroho

With the purchase of this pack you get two separate components: hardware and software. First, the hardware is just a simple little widget (which is good since the documentation is almost non-existent). On one end is a USB connector and an audio connector - you must use both - the USB for video connects to a USB port on your computer and the audio connector connects to a line-in port on your computer (Warning: I have Tried plugging it into my computer's microphone port since it's conveniently located on the front, but that didn't work in my case). The other end has component video (yellow RCA), S-Video, and left/right audio connectors (white and red RCA). You use one of the video jacks (composite or S-Video) and one (mono) or both (stereo) audio jacks to connect an audio/video source such as a VCR. With all the drivers installed, the software (more on that later) is pretty easy to use. You play the VCR, the software displays a preview window - you select the file format and destination, then click "Capture" - your audio/video is recorded to one file. Then you can use the software to convert the file to DVD or VCD. This package now comes with several different software providers (Broderbund, Mediostream and Movie Maker). For simple video/audio recording to a file, it works great and is fairly simple. However, I found a few problems with the software. Broderbund and Movie Maker crashed quite often on my Win XP SP2 system. Even when there were no crashes, I found trying to use the software to edit or otherwise modify what I had recorded overwhelming. I'm a computer pro, but a professional editor is needed here. The software is NOT intuitive and uses film industry jargon. At first I tried using the software to crop some frames from the front and back of the video I was capturing, but eventually gave up and just recaptured the shorter segment I was interested in. Finally, I had a driver conflict with the audio driver. After installation I bought and installed a webcam only to be frustrated that I couldn't install the webcam microphone driver. Turns out all I had to do was uninstall the Avermedia driver and the webcam driver installed just fine. All in all I'm glad I bought it as it did what it wanted - converted some old VHS recordings to digital. But I wish there was more focus on user interface and software documentation.