Hauppauge HD-PVR Fixed, and Early!

You know how I said two days ago that the culprit to my Hauppauge HD-PVR malfunctioning was the power supply? Well, I was absolutely right!

Earlier, I checked the shipment status of the replacement power supply I ordered October 9th on eBay. To my dismay, it still hasn't shipped—even though the seller clearly states that they always ship the same day of payment... Pfft...

Just as a shot in the dark, I additionally wrote a nice e-mail to Hauppauge themselves about the failing power supply and if they could send me a new one (keep in mind I'm nearly 3 years pass the warranty). Now, I've been very pleased with Hauppauge's customer support over the years I've own the HD-PVR. At one time (still pass the warranty), I requested a replacement driver/software CD because I lost my original one. Hauppauge asked no questions at all and immediately sent the latest CD out when they confirmed my shipping address.

Sure enough, the prompt response e-mail regarding the power supply simply said "Please give me your full name and address so we can ship out a new power supply.". Brilliant, not even a mention of a serial number to check warranty status! Either Hauppauge has outstanding customer service or they already knew something fishy was up with the NetBit power supplies shipped with the original HD-PVR.

Anyways, I didn't want to wait a week plus to get my HD-PVR working again, so I dug around the house to see if I have a similar power supply I could use for the time being. Low and behold, I found a power supply to my old D-Link router which fits the specifications of the HD-PVR's power supply almost perfectly (5V DC 2.5 Amp Output). So I removed the nasty NetBit power supply and plugged in the D-Link power supply to my HD-PVR and presto... everything back to normal! 

But now I have sort of a minor dilemna, I have two extra power supplies being shipped to me that's going to be of no use at the moment. One cost me $13 and the other free. I will probably be keeping both for backup, as you would never know if one could fail on you.

To summarize: YouTube videos will be back online today or tomorrow. Also, expect the Musou Orochi 2 Ultimate review and 100% game save very soon! Also, if you happen to have similar problems with your HD-PVR like mine, try replacing the power supply before declaring it dead. If you can't find a replacement power supply, e-mail Hauppauge and I'm sure they'll send you a new one even if out of warranty.

Thanks for reading and always checking back for updates! :)

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My HD-PVR is finally dead... or is it???

Earlier tonight as I was powering my gaming and recording center to record more gameplay videos for YouTube, I noticed my HD-PVR was no longer powering up video to my HDTV. I plugged in the USB cable to my laptop and Windows uttered an annoying message that the "USB device has malfunctioned and could not be recognized".

Now, this usually happens sporadically over the last year I've been using the HD-PVR. Meaning, it would sometimes fail to work properly and then abruptly work properly again until it fails again. Replugging all the electronics and powering them up various times and resetting the video settings on the PS3 always solves the problem. Last night I could only get it working with terrible purple lines scrolling up the display. This time however, no such luck. The HD-PVR remained unrecognized to Windows and my HDTV still displays no signal. So I then came to the scary conclusion that my once $200 investment is now a paper weight and is that I could no longer record any gameplay videos.

I was almost on the verge of buying another one when I stumbled across this article written from another blog: http://valkyriemt.wordpress.com/2011/04/09/a-defect-with-the-hd-pvr-will-eventually-fail-for-all/

It details that the most often failure of the HD-PVR is not the unit itself, but the power supply (adapter) that comes with it. It seems like the ancient capacitor plague has infected this cheap, Chinese made power supply as well.

So in a rush, I ordered a generic power supply off eBay. I was originally going to buy the original off the Hauppauge HD-PVR's official store website, but their store was broken and I could not put the item in my cart. Hauppuage, how you piss me off much so! Regardless, I decided it wasn't a good idea to buy another of the same power supply with time bomb capacitors that came with the HD-PVR anyways.

So I will await the new power supply (which should arrive by Monday) and will report back whether it fixes the HD-PVR or not. In the fortunate event that it does, I will resume recording and uploading videos to YouTube immediately. In the case that it doesn't and the HD-PVR is truly dead, I will have to buy another one or invest in a different capture device altogether (which I really don't want to do).

Yeah, I am still using my 5 year old HD-PVR. I didn't get the Intensity Shuttle Thunderbolt I discussed a lot on this blog because quite frankly, I'm just too used to the HD-PVR. Plus the fact that the Shuttle costs $100 more and it would only marginally increase my video quality.

To summarize: No new videos on YouTube for at least a few days to a week. Perhaps longer if the new power supply doesn't fix the HD-PVR. It should okay though, since you're used to me not uploading every day anyways, right?! But I really wanted to upload a new video today!! :(

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Q&A All About HD Video Capture!

I'm going to do another brief questions and answers post. And because I still get asked quite often about HD video capturing—including what my setup and equipment are and my process, I'm going to dedicate this Q&A exclusively to HD video capturing!

Q: What are your current video game capturing setup and equipment? 

A: I have owned and used the same setup and equipment since I started uploading HD videos in YouTube, way back in 2008-2009. So right off the bat I won't say it's the absolute best setup and equipment, but it is still incredibly high quality and efficient till this day.

For capturing hardware, I use a Hauppauge HD-PVR. Not the HD-PVR 2, as there's really no difference between the two besides the added benefit of HDMI (which is mostly worthless to my videos anyways, as most of them are on PS3 and it has HCDP aka "copy protection").

HD-PVR Front

HD-PVR Back

 I also think owning the original HD-PVR opens up a lot more options for me. For instance, I can configure the HD-PVR so it can capture all my videos using a simple DOS command prompt. If you have ever used the supplied Total Media software to capture, you'll know how much of a strain it can put on your CPU. Capturing through the command prompt uses absolutely zero percent CPU use. Remember to hook up your component out to your HDTV of course, unless you want to do blind capturing. If you want to learn how to do this and have the first generation HD-PVR, e-mail me!

The HD-PVR is connected to a laptop with a dual boot of Windows 7 and Mac OS X.

For software, I use literally too much, but then again using that many allows me full control of everything. But the most often I use are the three of: DGAVCDec for demuxing the .ts output file; AVISynth to enable the opening of the video file in VirtualDub and for basic trimming/fades; and VirtualDub for filtering and encoding/compressing.  For more advanced videos where serious editing, filtering and joining is required, I will additionally use Sony Vegas Pro.

Sometimes I will also use iMovie and Final Cut Pro X, depending on how fancy I need things to be.

Q: What are your steps to creation of a video for YouTube? 

A: Here is a brief summary of what I usually do >

1. Capture footage using HD-PVR through rcTVCap (DOS based capture).
2. Demux the .ts output file in DGAVCDec.
3. Edit my AVISynth script file, add a fade in/fadeout if necessary, add trim points if necessary.
4. Open the video file using the AVISynth script file in VirtualDub.
5. Apply my filter and compression presets for all my HD videos in VirtualDub.
6. Encode/compress the video using x264 codec (H.264). 

 If you don't understand that, then it's perfectly fine. It's quite advanced!

Those steps however are only the case if the video in question doesn't require serious editing and filtering, in which the steps will be a little different. I usually will just encode the video file in VirtualDub as uncompressed and edit it further in Sony Vegas Pro.

Q: What would your future video game capturing setup and equipment be, or what do you suggest would be the best one out there? 

A: If you truly want the best; meaning the best quality, the best audio and the best efficiency, your only option would be capturing uncompressed through HDMI and perhaps optic audio.

At the moment, there are quite few video capture devices on the market that can capture uncompressed and these are usually ones that are tailored to the professional market. The only ones that springs to my mind are any of BlackMagic's Intensity products.

So why does capturing uncompressed matter anyways? It matters because when you capture uncompressed, you are actually capturing the footage in its pristine, pure, natural state, with zero added compression of any kind. That means ZERO compression pixelation! More popular consumer capture devices (HD-PVR, Elgato, etc.) will force your videos to all go through its hardware encoder/compressor (usually H.264).

H.264 is an awesome codec and should be used on every video, but it's not so awesome when you want to use it for editing and have to recompress again. Recompressing H.264 with H.264 over again can degrade your video quality.

On the other hand, if you upload your captured videos the instant it comes out and never need to edit it, then a H.264 type capture device would be an easier, more affordable and better option. Then again, you may not care too much about the quailty either.

After you captured your uncompressed footage, you can then bring it into a video editor, edit it and then encode/compress it to H.264 at a HIGH bitrate. This results in the most minimal amount of quality loss and compression pixelation possible. Don't try uploading uncompressed videos directly or even use them for long term storage, as they can take up as much as 180MB per second!

Another added benefit of using uncompressed videos is that video editors tend to work much better with uncompressed videos than compressed video. If you don't believe me, just try to edit a H.264 video file then an uncompressed video file in Sony Vegas Pro.

The biggest downside to capturing uncompressed is the significant demand on your PC/Mac hardware. If you don't have either a huge SSD or hard drive RAID setup, don't even bother.

To answer the actual first part of the question—yes, I will change to an Intensity Shuttle Thunderbolt soon, along with a new desktop computer to meet the demanding needs of capturing uncompressed.

Q: Any thoughts on what you believe is the best video editing software? 

A: I have always liked and recommend Sony Vegas Pro or Sony Vegas Movie Studio to others. It's timeline based editor and interface is one of the best and easiest to use.

I also enjoy using iMovie and Final Cut Pro X on Mac at times, when I need to do some more cool looking visual effects and transitions (Sony Vegas doesn't come with a whole lot of awesome, jaw dropping visual effects and transitions).

Like I mentioned earlier, if you just want basic editing including trimming and light filtering, AVISynth and VirtualDub together makes an awesome combination.

Q: HDMI vs Component. Is there really a quality difference? 

A: Nah, not really. I tested both and at most you'll gain a 5% quality increase with HDMI compared to component, most being HDMI being a tiny bit sharper. Another benefit of HDMI is that its completely digital instead of analog like component. So if you live in an area that has a lot of analog interference, HDMI can completely get rid of these for you.

The only prominant reason to have the need to use HDMI is if you plan on capturing in 1080p. Then again, most PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii U games today aren't even 1080p native. What you are essentially doing is forcing the game to stretch to that resolution.

Capturing through HDMI with the PS3 also doesn't work because of the so-called HDCP copy protection. There are ways around this, but they usually involve converting the HDMI signal to component. What's the point?

Q: Any tips for HD video capturing? 

A: I have lots of tricks and tips in this post I made in July!

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6 Quick YouTube Quality Tips for HD Gaming Content

A big shout out goes to XxDevotedGamingxX for the inspiration of this post. He recently sent me a message claiming how nice my videos looked on YouTube in comparison to his own, and requested some tips and insights on how I capture, edit and encode my videos. He's actually not the first person to have tapped on my shoulder regarding how I achieve the quality I do on my videos. There has been quite a hefty amount of similar messages to be honest, so much that I am now considering to share some basic helpful tips on getting excellent video quality on YouTube right here.

Now, we'll keep in mind as the forefront that you already have a decent HD capturing device and you already know how to utilize it to churn out footage to your computer. And by decent, I do mean an actual device that can capture in HD resolution, and not something pathetic like a pretend HD device that stretches 480i/480p to HD.

1.) Try to capture in progressive scan only (720p or 1080p and not 1080i)

This is mostly common knowledge, but you still don't realize how many people capture in an interlaced resolution on their HD capture devices, either unknowingly or even purposely. This in turn greatly degrades the image and motion quality of the video, a lot more so if the person doesn't know how to correctly deinterlace using the correct deinterlace methods. With progressive scan, the quality is constantly smooth and you won't ever have to worry about the aforementioned flaws of interlacing.

A lot of people make the excuse of evading progressive scan for interlaced with the reason that they desire full HD 1920 x 1080 resolution for their videos, but their capture device can only capture in 1080i and not 1080p.

While I agree the resolution and bitrate boost on YouTube is a benefit, I also disagree in that the process of deinterlacing that 1080i footage—or no deinterlacing at all—will in turn be actually worse in quality than a 720p final product. The biggest common issues being image blurriness, ghosting, jagged edges and horizontal scan lines present during motion scenes.

Now there are lots of ways to go about deinterlacing interlaced footage, some better than others, but I don't have the time to go through any of them. In fact, it's downright nonsense to do so as my tip here is to have you NOT have to deinterlace anything, by means of capturing everything in progressive scan.

To summarize, stick to capturing everything in 720p and 1080p. Avoid 1080i unless you absolutely know what you're doing.

2.) Disable resampling in your video editor

If your video editor is resampling your clips, make sure to get into habit of turning off or disabling resample. While I'm not exactly clear cut on what resampling actually does, it does heavily affect fast motion footage and will cause very noticeable ghosting. Sony Vegas is notorious for defaulting to "Smart Resample" every time you add a new clip in the timeline. By right clicking the clip, going to "Properties" and selecting "Disable Resample" the first time you add the clip, it will also help alleviate the need to continuously disable resample on subsequent spliced segments of the clip.

3.) Check your video settings before you encode

I've come a lot across instances where people make the common mistake of not checking their video settings in their video editor before encoding their videos. Worse, some downright ignore it and stick to using the supplied defaults, which are mostly not tailored to HD progressive scan content.

Make sure your resolution and frame rate are set correctly. If your footage is in 720p 30fps, change it to 1280 x 720 30fps progressive scan. Using the wrong resolution can cause black bars to appear on your videos or your videos to be cut off, which is something you don't want.

Disable all deinterlacing options or set them to none if possible. Remember, I don't recommend capturing in interlaced for the best quality.

4.) Encode in 30fps and not 60fps

Unless you truly want to preserve the original motion of your videos to store on your computer, it's best to encode/convert your videos to 30fps in preparation for YouTube.

Why is this so? Remember, YouTube at current still can only display videos at a max of 30fps. Therefore, uploading a 60fps video will cause YouTube to automatically convert it to 30fps.

Now, the crucial part of why you want to encode to 30fps manually is to cut back encoding time and to skip YouTube's automatic frame rate conversion. You don't know what kind of shoddy frame rate conversion YouTube has in their system, and thus you'll want to avoid it as much as possible.

5.) Use a good quality codec to encode your videos

A bad codec, bad video format or even using the wrong bitrate can transform an amazing quality source footage to sheer embarrassment. It's very important that you take in great consideration what codec, bitrate and video format you use to encode your videos.

H.264/AVC is regarded as one of the best codecs available in terms of maintaining the highest image quality and pushing the lowest file size. I strongly recommend downloading x264 vfw—a free H.264 codec that works universally on many video editors—and encoding your videos in AVI format.

In the x264 vfw codec settings, select either single pass bitrate-based (ABR) or multi pass, and around  6000-13500Kbps. Multi pass encodes the video twice and consumes twice the amount of encode time; however, compared to single pass (ABR), it gives off higher quality while having roughly the same or lower file size.

Max frame refs (Analysis & Encoding) should be increased to at least 5 for increased output quality.

6.) Enhance image brightness, contrast, sharpness and saturation

The default video image settings for your capture device is most of the time inadequate and non-vibrant in colors and noticeably blurry, so you'll want to ramp these a bit in order to make the output image more rich and realistic. This is especially important for gaming footage.

Generally brightness and contrast should be upped to about 5-10% from default, whereas saturation should be upped to about 10-15%. Sharpness should be increased until the edges on the image becomes as clear as possible without distorting the image's contrast.

Of course, the defaults on capture devices are not universally identical, so it helps to simply use the eye to determine if the brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness is adequate enough.

If your capture device doesn't have video image controls built-in or available through its utility software, you can post apply them through a software such as VirtualDub/AviSynth and Sony Vegas.

Summary

If you want the best quality out of your videos possible for YouTube, follow all of these tips. If you like what you've read and want to know more about video capturing, editing and encoding; feel free to drop a link to my YouTube channel and post me a message!

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Upgrading My HD Capture Device Next Month

Okay, so I finally decided it's time to upgrade my HD capture device starting next month—that is, the one device that I've been using for all my YouTube videos since 2008!

Perhaps I didn't shed any light upon what I actually have been using. It's no other than the Hauppauge HD-PVR. I have the very first model of it, and I was one of the initial buyers to purchase it right when it came out.

Having gone through 5 years of model revisions and improved HD capturing technology, it was starting to feel as if my HD-PVR was falling behind the times. Although the quality was still there, I felt the ease of use was not prominent as it should be, and there were features on newer capture devices that I very much yearned for.

I especially desired a HD capture device that allowed me to capture in an uncompressed or lossless format, as opposed to forcing me to use its H.264 encoder. I always edit and re-encode my videos (never uploading the raw captured file), so once you start encoding a H.264 video with the same codec more than once, you're going to be losing a lot of quality. On the contrary, by having an uncompressed/lossless video file, I would have no worries of losing avertible quality when I edit and encode the video for YouTube.

Also, let's face it—HDMI is the way forward. Component limits your max capturing resolution to 1080i only, and you are additionally plagued to deal with analog interference, which can potentially ruin your footage.

So I decided my next HD capture device was going to be a BlackMagic Intensity Shuttle Thunderbolt.

It's perfect for my needs. It has HDMI in and out, 1080p capturing, uncompressed capturing and high bandwidth thunderbolt connection. From just looking at the technical specs and features alone, this device far outclasses any other existing consumer HD capture device on the market today. It's also priced very aggressively, at $230 new and around $260 with a thunderbolt cable.

What about more popular HD capture devices such as the HD-PVR 2 and Elgato HD Game Capture? While those are a nice upgrade to my existing HD-PVR due to them being HDMI equipped, they are more or less the same box of yesterday—forced H.264 encoding with last generation USB 2.0 connection. I don't want more of the same; I want something with unlimited potential, something the Intensity Shuttle Thunderbolt can offer.

I did briefly use an Intensity Shuttle a few months back, but it was the USB 3.0 version. My laptop unfortunately was not able to fully utilize the USB 3.0 speed, so the capture device was not fully operable. I now own a desktop that has thunderbolt connections, which is quite a lot faster than USB 3.0.

In conclusion, what does this all mean? For you as my viewers, it simply means much better video quality for my videos on YouTube. And I'm even hoping to be able to start uploading 1080p videos (although none of the games I've been recording are 1080p native). You can also expect a review here on this blog once I get it as well.

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Pristine Quality Screenshots with Hauppauge HD-PVR

The Hauppauge HD-PVR is perhaps one of the most well known HD capture devices on the market, and is actually the first HD capture device to include H.264 hardware encoding. This hardware allows the unit to seamlessly encode to H.264 on the fly without any impact on the CPU performance of the  computer.

While this is great for videos, it's an absolute nightmare for taking screenshots. This is mainly due to the automatic H.264 compression which cannot be cancelled into uncompressed, and lower maximum 13.5Mbps bitrate limit. Most of the time, attempting to capture a scene featuring heavy motion, then pulling a certain frame out of that clip to use as a screenshot will result in an image that is full of compressed artifacts. It doesn't help either that the HD-PVR—or at least the original model—didn't have any way to directly capture screenshots.

Here is an example of exactly what I'm talking about: capturing a video, then opening it in an viewer/editor and taking a frame from somewhere and making that frame into a screenshot. Note the compressing artifacts.

Wrong way to create a screenshot with HD-PVR.

There is a secret to being able to capture pristine, excellent quality screenshots on any certain part of any scene with any motion, however. And while this tactic works as intended, it does require some extra work, particularly good timing and a little luck.

The secret is really simple actually, just recall this—the first frame (frame 1) of any video the HD-PVR captures will always be in clean, pristine quality with no compression artifacts, no matter where it is taken. Although it's not as perfect as an uncompressed frame, it still comes very close.

So instead of trying to pull a frame out from the midst of a video, capture the frame you want as soon as it appears on the screen, quickly stop the capture, open up the mp4 or ts file—with something like DGAVCIndex—and just copy the first frame to be the screenshot. If you fail to get the right frame as frame 1, just simply keep trying until you get the frame you want, or closely to the frame you want.

Tip: If the time the device takes to start capturing a video takes too long, try capturing a scrap video first. Doing so will cause the HD-PVR to capture nearly instantly on the next and subsequent captures. To avoid lags and stuttering from high CPU usage, you can in conjunction toss the entire Total Media software altogether and resort to command prompt capturing using rcTVCap.

The right but more difficult way.

 Walla! All compression artifacts are gone and we have a very lovely screenshot to share!

This method may also work for other capture devices that can only capture in a compressed format. This may additionally be invaluable to those who own the HD-PVR 2, as it now has a built-in take screenshot tool. Nevertheless, I'm not sure how that function works on that model, so if your screenshots are looking too pixelated and nasty, it doesn't hurt to try this out.

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