Hauppauge HD PVR Rocket Review

[section_title title=”Conclusion”]Conclusion

In concluding this review I was extremely impressed with the overall presentation of the Hauppauge HD PVR Rocket, the packaging is well laid out and displays all the key information about the product, what it does and it’s intended usage.  Displaying the Rocket itself in a clear manner and the information was also very clear and concise.  The Rocket itself is very well made, and also has an appealing design, in itself the Rocket is very easy to use, the instructions supplied show how to configure it for stand alone usage on all of the major consoles as well as connecting it to your home computer to record directly too it.

Looking at the Rockets packaging and the device itself it is clear that Hauppauge have spent a lot of time in the design process, and have created a well presented product.  The Rocket itself feels robust and unlikely to break during regular usage.  It’s small enough to take with you wherever you may go, which is great if you move your console around a lot, or go to friends houses to game with them.  The microphone input is an excellent feature allowing you to record video footage and your own audio commentary as you play.

In my testing I recorded directly to an external hard drive as that is the main purpose of the HD PVR Rocket, I was pleased with the overall video quality that the Rocket can output.  The video and audio where all in sync and the video playback was excellent.  Due to it being console footage the playback was only at 30 frames per second but all in all that cannot be avoided.  The video playback was reasonably smooth and quite comfortable to watch.  As with any Video Capture the out put quality is dependent on the ability of the device or program to deal with the demand of what it is trying to capture as well as the video codec being used, fortunately the H.264 codec is reasonably robust and the Rocket is most definitely capable of recording console game footage.

Overall I was pleased with every aspect of the Hauppauge HD PVR Rocket, it is a very capable device designed solely to record console game footage, it’s price is something I took into to consideration and looking around at other similar products on the market it is priced very competitively.  The question is, is the Rocket the product for you?  That question isn’t hard to answer because everyone needs are different.  Personally I require a capture device that is designed for recording PC Video game footage which the Rocket is not designed to do.  These kinds of video capture cards all have the same design problem, and whilst some are being marketed as a device to capture video from both leading consoles as well as PC.  They simply cannot do so out of the box, more so they are designed to connect to the PC to use it’s own internal storage capacity to record too rather than an external hard drive etc.

The miss wording on the front of the packaging can lead many people to believe you can record PC video games directly out of the box which you simply cannot do, other than that one issue the entire product is well presented, the design of the packaging as well as the product itself is quite appealing.  It’s portability is an excellent selling point, and the fact that you can record directly to external storage without the need of a computer is a fantastic concept and most definitely a reason to pick up the HD PVR Rocket.

The choice of using the H.264 Codec was an excellent choice by Hauppauge it is an excellent video codec being adopted by many companies.

I would like to thank Hauppauge for the sample and look forward to seeing more from them in the future.