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Grand AV USB 2.0 Pro

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Mobility is an essential attribute of modern man. Cell phones, handheld computers, laptops - all this accompanies us every day in our lives, bringing considerable benefits, year after year, providing us with an ever wider range of opportunities. For example, in the not so distant past, when Wi-Fi had just begun to appear in communicators and cell phones, we wondered - what benefit (of course, apart from the banal Internet) would this technology bring to mobile communications? And what? Skype came unnoticed to us, making mobile communication even more universal, practical and affordable. And this is just one of many similar episodes of our lives!

Our review is dedicated to just such a device, which, perhaps, will cause bewilderment or genuine delight. After all, we will consider a video capture device that can turn any modern laptop (although no one will stop you from using this device on a desktop computer) into a real video capture station! All you need is that free USB port. This device is called Grand AV USB 2.0 Pro, and it was provided to us for testing by Video Control LLC, one of whose activities is the creation, transfer and playback of various multimedia data.

This review and testing of the device was carried out on an Acer Aspire 4520 laptop, which has the following main parameters:

• Processor - AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core TK-55 (1,8 GHz, 2x256 KB L2 cache)
• Memory - 2 GB DDR2
• Hard drive - Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 (160 GB, 5400 RPM, SATA).

Let's start our review with "clothes":

Brightly informative "clothing", isn't it? It is from her that we get the first information about the device.

A loose and slightly abbreviated translation of the advertising slogan printed on the box: "Grand AV USB 2.0 Pro is a small USB 2.0 device capable of capturing live video to your laptop with ease."

From marketing statements, let's move on to the technical characteristics of the device, which are divided by the manufacturer into hardware (Hardware Features) and software (Software Features):

Hardware Features:

Software features:

• compression of video and audio streams in real time in DivX format;
• Support for photography and video editing functions;
• support for the following permissions:
  • 160x120;
  • 320x240;
  • 352x240;
  • 352x480;
  • 640x480;
  • 720x480.

And in the end, here are the computer requirements necessary to implement all of the above features:

Given the above characteristics, it can be assumed that video signal compression is carried out by the computer's central processor. Is it so? We'll see later.

Let's pay a little attention to the appearance of "Grand AV USB 2.0 Pro":

A fairly small, neatly made device. Case material - plastic, backlashes and squeaks are completely absent. On the top half there is a blue LED signaling the on (i.e. connected) state.

On the reverse side there are two stickers (with a serial number and a warranty seal). The weight of the "Grand AV USB 2.0 Pro" is small, but sufficient for the device to spontaneously turn off from the vertically located USB connector due to its own weight. With horizontally located USB ports, there are no such problems.

A few words about the package - it is minimal. The kit includes "Grand AV USB 2.0 Pro", a small manual and a software CD. On the disk you can find drivers for Windows XP/Vista in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. In addition, there, on the disk, is "CyberLink PowerDirector" - a video editor that is quite easy to learn and use, the registration number for which is printed on the disk itself.

Let's open the device:

The key element on this side of the board is the EM2.0 USB 2862 A/V controller chip from EMPIA Technology. Among its features, there is no hardware video compression, so our earlier guess about using the computer's CPU to compress the video signal is confirmed. The small chip to the left of the EM2862 is the HT24LC02, a two-wire serial read-only memory (ROM) containing firmware. A little away from these chips is a two-channel 20-bit codec chip AC'97 - EMP202 from the same company, which is responsible for sound transmission. It also houses two 74HC4052D analog signal multiplexers.

There is only one chip on the second side of the board - it is a 9-bit analog-to-digital converter TVP5150AM1 from Texas Instruments.

On this, the "iron" part of our story is over, and then let's move on to the software part.

The first time you connect "Grand AV USB 2.0 Pro" to your computer, you will be prompted to install the driver. The driver itself is located in one of the folders on the disk, its installation is absolutely trivial and does not cause difficulties. After installing the driver, another item will appear in the device manager:

This position means that the driver is installed correctly, and you can start working. The driver provides us with the following settings, accessible from any video capture software:

The first two tabs are available on almost all video capture devices, we can say that their presence is a sign of good taste. And the third tab is a little more interesting: here you can "on the fly" implement "cropping" of the image around its entire perimeter ("Image Mask" engine):

No cropping

Cropped

Here, in this tab, you can specify the mirror image of the image vertically and horizontally.

Having dealt with the driver settings, install and run the bundled "CyberLink PowerDirector". After installing and registering the program, we will see its main window:

the program is quite simple, all the necessary functions (capture, editing, output) are available in it. Unfortunately, the Russian language is not included in it. This circumstance slightly complicates the development of the program, although, we repeat, further work with the program does not cause difficulties (more about the program can be found here).

The software that is offered to us with the "Grand AV USB 2.0 Pro" may not suit the end user for some reason, and therefore we will conduct another test - we will try to use third-party software. In this capacity, we will try to use the popular utility "iuVCR" and no less popular among ordinary users "Pinnacle Studio" version 10. Let's start with "iuVCR":

the program easily recognized the video capture device, and the further process of working with the device was no different from working with a standard video capture card. There were no problems, including frame drops or out of sync sound and image, were observed.

Let's look at such a moment as CPU loading while "Grand AV USB 2.0 Pro" is running:

This screenshot shows a graph of processor load at the time of capturing a video stream. It can be seen that the two cores of the central processor are loaded unevenly, and the average load of the cores is about 30%. The stock is more than enough!

At the end of the review, I would like to say the following: "Grand AV USB 2.0 Pro" is intended, first of all, for those users who want their laptop to be in no way inferior to a monstrous desktop. And this device brings them one step closer to their cherished goal. And if a laptop is not your choice, then in this case you get a full-fledged video capture device, for the installation of which there is no need to open the system unit. It is enough to connect the device to a USB extension cable - and everything will work.

Publication: ixbt.com

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