StarTech.com Composite to USB Video Capture - S Video Converter / Analog to Digital Video Adapter with TWAIN and Mac Support (SVID2USB23)

This product was a massive help to my Dad and I. My Dad had an old camcorder with old tapes on it that he wanted to digitalise, without having to spend huge amounts of money.The package comes with 2 disks. 1 being the drivers for the hardware, the second being the recording software. However, using these disks are optional, as you can go onto the startech website, enter the product code which is found on the packaging, and easily download the drivers from there (about 60mb) (The file you download comes with both Mac and Windows drivers, you cant download them separately)I have tried the software for both mac and windows and this is what i found:Mac: I found this the easiest and overall better software. After choosing which installer package you want to install with based on which language you want, you are up and running. For Mac, the drivers automatically install the capture software, called Ezcap. Its a very simple software dedicated for capturing video and audio off an external device. The feature that stands out the most is that it has a recording timer, meaning i can set it to only record for an hour, so it will on record the video I want it to record. With out this timer, I have to manually stop the recording when the video has finished playing. This is really the only feature that stands out over the Windows software. Everything else is pretty simple, you choose a name and where to save it, and after it has finished, you have your digitalised video.Windows: Now Windows is a bit more complicated. The drivers you install via disk or download will not install the capture software, it will only install the drivers. This is where the second disk comes in. On this disk is a video editing software called "Movavi video editor". After installing this software, it asked for a product code, which i found on the cover of the disk, which i put in, however, the software still says 7 day trial on it. (I don't personally use the windows software so I don't know wether you can continue using the software when the trial is over." The Movavi software is not dedicated for capturing video, it is video editing software that has a seperate feature to capture video off an external device. It does its job well except, as said earlier, there is no timer feature, so you have to manually stop recording.Overall I am very happy with how this product works, I took a bit of a risk with using this product, as I had no idea if it would be compatible with my Dads old camcorder. But I am now able to digitalise all of his old tapes, and make them safer and easier to watch.

This worked like a charm for a conference I recently recorded. I wouldn't want to use this as my only device. It's a good secondary and backup recorder. I monitored the HDMI output. The unit slowly flashes a blue circle around the record button when recording. There is no other indication other than that. You can use the SD Card Mode software utility that installs along with Vivastation to select the resolution and bitrates of 3,5,8,15, or 20 mbps. My recording defaulted to "auto" and it seemed to use 15 mbps to capture my 1080i video stream. It looked great and I was able to use it for the finished files. Next time I might see about using this to capture 5 mbps for immediate upload use while recording a higher bitrate version for post-production. At this price point you have what seems like a reliable device for this backup purpose. It's limited obviously in terms of feedback and verification. You have to do the math to figure how much time you have available on the SD card. I calculated 4 hours available on a 32 GB card with a bit of a cushion--maybe 15 minutes. This was using the auto setting which was apparently at 15 mbps, so 20 mbps should get you 3 hours, and so on. By the way, 64 GB cards will not work with this. I had to cal Startech to confirm that. Its a SDHC not SDXC device.I am also trying to use this for analog capture, not using the component input, but using another Startech device to convert composite standard def to HDMI. Not sure why it's not working. The documentation is poor with a lot of electronics like this. At least Startech makes up for it with excellent customer service and products that generally do work very well once you figure out the quirks.

This item is not well supported by the company that produces it. It comes with software for the mac (EZCAP) that is pretty clunky. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. It claims to work with other software but so far I have not found a single other piece of software that works. The hardware itself seems to work as long as you can get the software to work. I guess for the price...