Hardware Review: The Roxio Game Capture External USB Capture Device – Machinima Made Easy

With the advent of more and more social networks allowing for anyone to upload and share videos, the trend seems to be that many gamers want to record themselves playing games or at the very least show their friends that perfect head shot or boss battle online via YouTube or other video sharing sites. ROXIO aims to help levitate that need for the everyday gamer with it’s low cost and easy to use Game Capture device, so that anyone can be a machinima rock star.


Right from the second you launch the ROXIO software, your only given two options. You can either capture or edit & share, simple and not confusing at all. As you can tell ROXIO has really stripped away all of the nonsense found in most high end software packages but as you’ll see in a moment, kept more than enough features to give even the more skilled video editors a robust editing software package to really get some professional looking videos.
Now let’s see what you “can” and “can not” do with the ROXIO Game Capture device. You can plug any device that has a component cable output, though the packaging states PS3 and Xbox 360 on retail box. The Xbox original, PS2 with component cable and Wii all worked just fine as well as looked great even passing through the capture device.

As you just saw in the photo gallery your options are brought down to the most simplistic format, it’ll be hard to mess something up. When capturing all you need to do to get right into it is make sure that the ROXIO game capture is selected as your source and that the audio is set to the ROXIO device as well and then click CAPTURE to start and Stop Capture when your done. Easy..!
Since this isn’t actually a “how to” article I won’t get into a step by step when using the ROXIO editing software, but, I will tell you that from the experience on using other more “high end” editing software, the provided software can help you produce some fancy effects and once learned can provide you with all of the essential tools anyone would need to start sharing game play videos for the world to see.

Now, to finish this all off, I wouldn’t be doing any of you much justice if I only talked about the positive, there are a few things that could of been added to make this an almost perfect product.

1. First off you “can not” capture in HD at all. You can only pass through the device in HD so that your TV’s image is in HD while your playing your games.

2. You can’t connect any SD consoles to the device even though it only captures in 480p?! this is a big problem for most of us that run retro sites, since 99% of our consoles are only able to connect via SD methods. A simple composite input couldn’t of added that much of an added cost to the device, right? Only retro games found on Wii, 360 and PS3 need apply.

3. Even though the editing software is simple enough to use, it still has a pretty big learning curve when trying to master some of the more fancier features. Not everyone knows how to use a basic video editor let alone have the skill or patience to learn complex software.

So you see, though none of the mentioned negatives by any means should stop you from going out and purchasing this awesome device. Don’t buy it with the thought of capturing full HD videos nor expecting it to be the easiest video editor on the market.
The bottom line:
If you want to capture your game play habits and share them on YouTube, Facebook or any other video sharing site then get the ROXIO Game Capture device, it’s well worth the investment. You get a full featured video editing suite and great solid hardware that allows you to capture from an HD console of choice. With a little time spent on learning the software, you could start making some incredible machinima videos for the world to love and/or hate. You get a whole lot of product for the low cost of $99.99 estimated U.S. retail price. I’ve personally spoken with ROXIO on some of my concerns of not being able to actually capture in FULL HD, ans was told that it was a cost issue, but that a future product update could implement capturing in HD.

What you get for $99.99 :
-USB High Speed 2.0 Capture Box
-Support 1080i/720p pass-through to TV and 480p capture to PC simultaneously
-Support NTSC and PAL
-Cables included:
-1x 6-foot USB 2.0 cable
-1x 6-foot Component to Component Cable (male/male)
-1x 6-foot RCA Stereo Audio cable (male/male)

Compatible With Many Standards:
-Capture in AVI, WMV and DIVX. Export to H.264
-Hot key to start/stop video recordings
-Upload to YouTube, Facebook and other gaming sites
-Support 16:9 widescreen capture
-Leverage NVIDIA CUDA, ATI Stream and Intel Quick Sync Video when encoding in H.264
-XP, Vista and Win7

Below is a capture test using the ROXIO Game Capture and an Xbox 360.



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Official ROXIO Game Capture website.