Review on 🎥 StarTech.com USB Video Recorder - HDMI Capture Card - 1080p - 60fps - HDMI DVI VGA (USB3HDCAP) Black by Kenny Sanchez

I'm always a bit nervous about these types of devices - encoding and capturing video is quite a complex problem that requires fairly well thought out hardware and software. So far everything has worked fine. === Good stuff ===* The product installed easily with almost no glitches (see below). I connected the box to an HDMI cable, plugged the USB3 cable into the USB3 port on my Windows 10 computer and within minutes I was streaming videos to my computer. The install seemed to fail on the first run, but rebooting my system a second time fixed the problem (most of the time). latest version before installation. The software lets you set timers for video recording, but otherwise doesn't have much control over bitrate, formats, etc. It creates a 1920 x 1080 MP4 video with MPEG audio at 29 fps and 11500 bitrate. Definitely good enough video for anything that worries me. Cleaners might object.* I used an HDMI ViewHD splitter to get a second HDMI signal from my cable box. I think this little box just forgets to send the HDMI copy protection parts, but I can't tell if the software/hardware recognizes the HDMI copy protection. * The resulting audio files are clean, and the audio and video are perfectly in sync throughout. I was a little nervous because when you look at the preview screen while recording, the two tracks are a bit out of sync, but everything was fine on playback. The PC screen will also lag your TV by about half a second.* Should be obvious, but this is live video recording, meaning it takes 30 minutes to capture a 30 minute show. The hour-long program creates a file about 5 GB in size. === Not so good stuff ===* Using a timer can be a bit awkward. Nothing fancy, but the UI is a bit finicky and sometimes I enter the wrong time.* After installing the video capture software, my computer now throws a random exception error when restarting. I just ignore it and everything seems to be working fine, but I hate it when something like this messes up a clean install of Windows. === Summary === I've been using this product for about 2 weeks now and am mostly happy with it. The software could be a bit easier to use, especially the timer, but it's certainly not the typical useless software that cheaper hardware seems to follow. The hardware itself worked without any issues and the resulting video files were clean with no artifacts.