Having recently acquired a Hauppauge HD PVR
Things You’ll Need
- An Xbox 360 (naturally, although the same advice here could be applied to the PS3)
- The Xbox HD AV cable with component video
- The Hauppauge HD PVR
- A Recording PC within a couple of metres of the Xbox which supports USB 2.0
- Ample disk storage – HD videos can get very big
Other Capture solutions
Sadly, there are very few options as far as HD video capture is concerned – and those that are available tend to be quite expensive. Realistically, there are two or three options – the Hauppauge HD PVR, and two Blackmagic Design devices: The Video Recorder and the Intensity Pro.
The Blackmagic Video Recorder is USB 2.0, like the HD PVR – but is harder to source and my impression was that the software supplied was for Macs only – conversely, the HD PVR’s software is Windows only. The Intensity Pro supports both, but is more expensive and is internal – it uses a PCI-E slot. The Intensity Pro is HDMI-based capture, while the two cheaper options rely on component video.
Recording
Whichever option you choose, it’s important that your computer is up to scratch – for the HD PVR, you’ll need USB2.0 support and fast enough throughput for your storage. I record at a fixed bitrate of 8Mb/s with the HD PVR’s native H.264 encoding, which gives good results. Each gigabyte of space will give you approximately 17 minutes of recording time with these settings.
Videos are captured in either a native .TS (transport stream) format, or optionally as a MP4 or M2TS formats – although I had most luck with the plain .TS format for editing. Sony Vegas Pro 9.0 handles the HD .TS files without too much issue, and once the video is edited it’s just a question of re-encoding to a more YouTube-friendly MP4.