EasyCap Unbox, Install and Review

Please see my more thorough review below
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EasyCap (Verson 2) Summary Review

To be fair and up front, my purpose for buying this unit only involved video,
not audio, to feed a security camera signal into one of my computers so I could
record it without having to buy a full blown DVR.

After some thought though, I decided it was worth doing some more testing to
make this review more complete.

* Drivers don't seem to be a big issue, unless that's what's causing the Video
and Audio issues I mention below. I believe in trying to work with what I'm
given as that is what the authors intend. The problem is often that people
lack information or get impation and expect something that works by default,
but that's not always the circumstance that matches what they are trying to do.

All three versions of Windows I tested managed to find the drivers on their
own without needing the included CD. Although Windows 10 either added the
drivers behind the scenes or just completely missed them forcing me to go
trigger the driver search and update manually.

* Video Quality - seems about half that of DVD quality or perhaps closer to
medium length VHS quality (i.e. a T120 tape with four hours of recordings).
That's not quantitative, just an estimate. However, the included software does
make it fairly easy to create a DVD from the captured video which is pretty
much what they are advertising.

On initial attempts I couldn't get it to switch out of it's default PAL
resolution and framerate with VirtualDub, but there's something different about
the included software. If you set it for DVD instead of WMV or other formats,
that seems to get the best quality with NTSC. However, in order to GET NTSC,
you need to find a program that is bundled with the main program but not
mentioned anywhere that I saw. That program is called ChangeVideoStandard.exe
and is included in the start menu folder.

I haven't yet tested it with what appears to be native PAL settings. At least
with those you get a few more vertical lines and perhaps the problem in NTSC is
some sort of on-the-fly down-conversion which is making the video pretty
grainy. Dark areas on my test recordings were VERY noisy.

It's also possible that on-board hardware is doing some sort of compression
to lighten the load on the computer or fit the USB 2.0 spec and that is why
quality is limited before it reaches the computer.

* Audio sort of works. I didn't test during the video but tried it later.

On the two systems I tried it on I was getting patterns of pops in the audio.
I also noticed on playback of my test recordings that they were there too. So I
then converted them from the recorded MPEG-1 to MPEG-2 hoping that the
conversion would eliminate any extra data that might have been packed into the
audio stream. That seems to have worked, but initially with some generational
loss in the video. There are ways around that, and I maybe the audio can be
improved by tweaking some setting in the program, but I'm just letting you know
what you get "out of the box" so to speak.
* Synchronization was also a bit off.

I noticed a bit of synchronization issue with the MPEG-1 file, but it was
mostly cleaned up when converted, though not perfectly. My suspicion there is
that there is an issue with interleaving which is how the Audio and Video data
are stored to help ensure that Audio doesn't play before video or vice versa.

* Final Notes

During editing I noticed that when I was having problems with Windows 7 a
notification popped up saying that the the device was installed and ready to
use. Perhaps I got a ahead of myself and that's why I didn't initially find
the device in VirtualDub.

Speaking of VirtualDub, it can be found at VIRTUALDUB.ORG and the download
can be found on SOURCEFORGE.NET (There's a link from the main site).

Installation is pretty simple.

1. Download the zip file appropriate for your system.
2. Unzip the archive into a folder in a place you'll remember
3. Double click on VirtualDub.exe

The first time you run the program it may do some additional setup, but just
follow the prompts and your up and running.

Видео EasyCap Unbox, Install and Review канала Ed Michel