REVIEW: SmartCapture dongle

FastVDO sent us in for a review their SmartCapture USB dongle which is able to encode in h.264 from many input devices.

The small package comes with a CD that includes the manual, driver and applications, the actual dongle, and a RCA to 3.5 mm A/V cable. First, you install the drivers from the CD and then you connect the SmartCapture dongle. Using the composite cable you can then connect it to a VCR, DVD player, cable box, camcorder or a TV set. Some devices do export in composite but they come with a 3.5mm A/V cable too, which is not convenient because then you are get two male composite cables. What you need in this case is a 2-way female composite adapter, which will allow you to connect the two devices together.

One this is done you can use the supplied application, SmartPlayer, to go to "recording" mode and start recording. You can record up the standard NTSC resolution, at 720x480 at 6 mbps (although for that resolution 2 mbps is good enough). You can record audio and video, audio only or video only. The combined audio and video is saved in .mp4 format and is able to be played back in a variety of devices, although not on the Sony PSP.

The Options dialog allows you select audio's and video's bitrates, the width and height up to 720x504, the frame rate of 30 and 15 and where to save the actual video. Unfortunately, the Options dialog "forgets" your settings the next time you load that dialog. Before recording you can also adjust the Brightness and Color of the incoming video. In general, we found that this little dongle is able to record in the NTSC resolution is real time on our 3 Ghz P4, which is a very good performance.

However, not everything is rosy in the product. The options won't let you select custom resolutions, while the frame rate is either 30 or 15, and not also 24. This, along the non-included RCA female adapter, are the only two problems we had with the device. Hopefully, they will include the adapter in a newer version of the product and they will fix their Smartplayer -- at least for that $250 this product costs.

Other than that, this is a very nice little product and it will save you a lot of time of re-encodings of TV and other shows!

Rating: 8/10