 welcome to another unboxing and first look and I'm totally gonna do this I'm gonna put it on the little...weeeeee we're filming in 60 FPS which will be at zero benefit to y'all on the the YouTube's but that'll make the motion clear for when I review the footage later. This is the Avermedia RecCentral Live Gamer HD capture and share your PC game footage okay full HD 1080p there's a sticker on here so it seems it was probably added sometime after the packaging design but You can live stream with XSplit. This thing is very, very compatible with XSplit streaming software and it makes it very easy to use. See, no plastic seal. This is not my first time opening this product. I have actually used it already and it's pretty friggin' awesome. So let's go ahead and have a look at the back of the packaging here and I want to show you guys what's going on. So we got HDMI or DVI connectors. You can just use, you can adapt DVI to HDMI. So it has an input and an output. That's how it gets a signal from your video card and then passes it through to your monitor. It uses a PCI Express interface because due to the enormous amount of bandwidth involved in capturing HDMI, it does need PCIe. It has an H.264 hardware compression engine built into it. So the major advantage of this approach versus something like a Blackmagic Intensity Pro, which is one of the other most commonly used HDMI capture cards, is that while you lose some of the color depth and some of the sub-sampling and whatnot, you gain the fact that your CPU is not responsible for doing any of the compression. Remember guys, if you're not compressing 1080p footage, you're going to be working with enormous files that you'll have to have like a multiple hard drive array or an SSD to even copy those files from the capture device to your hard drive. Alright, moving right along, you got a dedicated record button so you can easily just press the button when you're ready to record and Rec Central. So that's their software. Rec Central allows you to configure it as much or as little as you want. So you can either use the totally, I forget what they call them, but it's like capture wizard or amateur. So there's three different wizards that you can use to set it up and one of them is so simple you basically press the button and it's ready to go. You can record voice commentary with your game play, that's good. It does have a pass through for audio as well. You can real live game play over the internet using Twitch TV or XSplit to Twitch TV. Profile selection over here, yeah the profiles, those are easy. So there you go, the maximum recording quality is 1080p at 30 FPS. You can also do 720p at 60 FPS if you prefer to have a more fluid frame rate versus a higher overall resolution. Remember, most people watching your video are not going to be watching it at full screen so if you filmed at 720p in order to get better fluidity, especially for something like FPS gaming, you might find that to be an advantage. The packaging is excellent. See they got like a cool little sort of shimmery black sort of thing going on on the cover for this and oh right, another reason you might want to film at 720p 60 FPS is if you're capturing from a console. So it's fully capable of capturing from the PC you're gaming on, from another PC that you're not gaming on, although there's not much point in doing that because a big part of the advantage is the built in video engine in here that makes it so you don't have to waste CPU cycles and you can also use it to capture console footage on a PC that is nearby. So before we get too far into the device itself, let's have a look at all the other stuff that's included. So first things first, there's our ready to record button. It's just a USB sort of software enabled hardware button that you can keep up on your desk. We've also got their software which is included, but you can also download on the Avermedia website. They've made so many revisions to the software over the last little while that continue to improve it. I'm very impressed with the way that they continue to support the product. Sometimes you see these kinds of products where they're kind of purpose built specialty pieces of hardware and they'll kind of release it and they'll go, oh yeah, no, the software is fine, just don't worry about it. When it's not fine and you do have to worry about it, in this case they are actually trying to make sure that they're keeping everything updated and everything cool. Xsplit Broadcaster Gift Certificate. Oh, okay, cool. So apparently they're giving you a deal on Xsplit. Xsplit is awesome by the way. Xsplit is what I use to do my live streams. Okay, content, okay, we're not going to overdo too much about that. Let's have a look at included accessories. So just a three and a half millimeter audio cable. Oh, look at that. They include a DVI to HDMI adapter, so if you wanted to capture HDMI in from a DVI output on a video card, you'd just go like that. Well, you'd have to have a DVI cable out to this, but you guys get the point. So you might go HDMI out to your DVI monitor and sort of everything would be cool. And then this one is for the other way around, right? So this one, so you can go out from DVI from your video card and then use a small HDMI cable to go into here, and they actually include the HDMI cable you need. So they include pretty much all the cables you need to get going because you'll already have DVI out from your video card. That's what they're assuming. So you just, excuse me, sorry, you swap this, you use this HDMI cable to go into the input, and then you go DVI out to your monitor and you're ready to go. So we'll have a close look at the card itself. It's got sort of a shield on it that may or may not do anything, but looks really nice. It's got like a brushed metal finish on it. There's your PCI Express 1X interface. Flipping over to the back, just got some logos and stuff, and this is the business end. So there's your HDMI out. That goes out to the device you're going to be using to monitor what's actually going on, so your monitor or your TV. There's HDMI in. That goes from the device that's outputting the signal you want to capture, audio out and audio in to go along with those. Although you are not forced to use the analog connectors, you can also capture audio out over HDMI, which I have done with this card already. So what's the point? Lots of people are streaming on Xsplit. Okay, do yourselves a favor. Go look up PewDiePie on YouTube. Mind blown. It's the most bizarre thing in the world, but he's making hundreds of thousands of dollars streaming games and sort of having a webcam going in the background. So I'm not saying that you buy one of these, you're going to make back your investment like that, but if you're good at it, then there's a huge advantage to having something like this because instead of using up CPU cycles, which will cause your game performance to degrade because unless you have a beast CPU, that's just what happens, this does all the compression of the footage on its own. You can use it to capture external sources such as consoles as well, so it gives you more flexibility and it works very seamlessly compared to, and the compatibility is better compared to the Blackmagic Intensity Pro that I also own. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the AverMedia Live Gamer HD. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.