Hauppauge HD PVR Rocket Review

[section_title title=”Performance”]Performance

Out of the box I could see that the HD PVR Rocket is a unique product, roughly fitting in the palm of my hand it isn’t overly large but you most defiantly won’t be losing it anytime soon. Build quality is always importable when it comes to a product that is designed to be portable. I can say that Hauppauge have not let themselves down. The build quality of the Rocket is excellent, not to mention the LED lighting effect that flows around the device and changes colour dependent on whether it is recording or not is a fantastic added touch.

Testing the performance of the HD PVR Rocket I recorded about an hour of footage from my Playstation 3 to an external hard drive I had available. I was surprised by the video quality being recorded, whilst this was still video recorded over component video output the quality was still pretty good, the H.264 video encoding creates a video file that isn’t overly large when it comes to file size and the quality was excellent.

For playing back the video I connected the hard drive to my computer and loaded the video into Sony Vegas, I played back the video watching about twenty minutes of the video, skipping through various sections of the video to see how well it had recorded.  Due to the video being from the Playstation 3 I was unable to record via HDMI as the Playstation 3 uses HDCP encryption, even then the video quality was reasonable, the audio was in sync with what was happening on screen and the Rocket kept with some of the more graphically intensive sections of the game.

I tested the Rockets recording capability when connected directly to my PC, this was a simple process of connecting the Rocket to my graphics card via HDMI, this allowed the Rocket to pick up the image being displayed on my monitor. It was then that I found an issue with the Rocket.  For it to receive any audio I had to change the playback device to HDMI Output, changing the playback device stops all audio be transmitted through my sound card.  Making any game I intend to play/record unplayable, though the Rocket will continue to receive and record that audio.

This is of course down to the design of the Rocket itself, it’s main purpose is to record Console Game footage not PC Game footage, and lacks the required audio input/output found on other devices that are  designed to record from PC.  The Rocket simply does not have a line in or line out, so it is not possible to loop the audio from my sound card through and then back to my speakers or headphones.  This becomes a none issue if you are using a television for your screen as the audio will be transmitted to it over HDMI.

Having recorded a few minutes of video footage from Bioshock  Infinite I can say that the video quality being recorded was excellent, the audio yet again was in perfect sync with what was happening on screen.  Overall I was pleased with the quality of the video I had recorded, not to mention the file size being much smaller than I was used to see from video capture.  Personally I use a capture software for recording PC game play, this dependent on the video codec being used can end up with some rather large video files.  This is where the H.264 codec comes into it’s own, the file size is smaller than other video codecs available at the moment but keeps the quality of the video intact.

This is my opinion was an excellent choice by Hauppauge and is one being mirrored within the video capture card market at the moment.