1tb video recorder Box with RGB for 140$ Woot?

I just received the Recorder. I took it out of the box and at first glance it looks like a pretty nice unit, does not feel too cheap.

I do not know If I will fully test it tonight but will be giving you guys a nice review in the following Days :D

My initial test run of the thing tells me that this might be interesting and do what we want but it is not sure yet.

I will tell you more tomorrow but I just realized that to properly test all I want out of the thing I would need a regular SCART-SCART cable. Which I dont have...
All I have are console to Scart cables... POO!!

Fellow Canuck eagerly awaiting your test results- keep us posted man!

Right now the damn thing is giving me headaches.

It seems it does take RGB and can transcode it to Component, composite and HDMI, with a little lag but really not too bad.
I managed to connect it to my network and I opened movie files and could watch them on my TV.
So far so good.

Where I have problems is everything that involves the internal HDD...
I did the auto format. It tells me that it completes it successfully.
But then I cannot record. I cannot copy files to it from my network.
When I try to it gives me a funny icon on the screen with a X on it. Fun thing is there is no trace of this in the user manual.
I tried with a different HDD, same thing.
Now I tried manual format and left all at default and it "Seems" to be formatting but I get no feedback from the crap GUI except a little rotating wheel. No percentage bar or anything. It has been at it for like 20 min. While the Auto format took 10 sec...

So right not I am starting to feel pessimistic about what is starting to look like a Chinese POS plagued by buggy firmware, bad documentation and bad GUI.
With a bit of luck it might eventually finish the manual format... No way to know if it is doing something or is glitched.

OK finally some results.

I think my Markus 750 unit might be defective, I cannot use the internal HDD but there is a trick where you can connect it to an external USB HDD and use this for recording, as long as it uses FAT32..

Well, that worked and I could make some RGB recordings. I made RGB recordings of Genesis SNES and RGB famicom. Currently this is the only consoles I have a scart Cable for.
IT worked fairly well for all consoles. For those wondering if it really records RGB and not merely takes composite from SCART; My genesis Cable does not have the Composite signal, it only has RGB and Sync, so that means the module really captures RGB.
That is pretty nice but on the other hand you have very little control on how the signal is processed.

The machine will upscale it and compress it to MPEG whether you want it or not. The result is still decent though.
I made a 3 min video of me playing Sonic 2 recorded in the Highest quality. The result was a 200 mb file. There are some artifacts but not too bad. The sound is very good. And also, to my pleasant surprise, it records in 60 FPS. So you can see the boss hit flashing effect and all.
Windows say the video is 29 FPS but it really looks like 60. Maybe someone can help me explain this?

However when I uploaded the video to youtube it was butchered. It looks pretty bad after youtube treatment but the worst is how the frame rate is now all choppy. Maybe someome more familiar with Youtube can help me find a way to make it look better on youtube?
There is also some sparkly artifacts that come from the upscaling/transcoding of the Genesis RGB, it did not happen on my other consoles. This can be seen on the video.
I will do more experiments with the unit and keep you posted.
I will also try to make a short clip and upload it on dropbox so you guys can see how it looks Before youtube.
Stay tuned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJxhSmU3w1M

Looks decent when it is still but Sonic generally moves too fast for Youtube. Look forward to the Dropbox version. After examining that I can explain the 29.97 vs 60fps. My setup records to 60fps for real in ProRes 422(HQ) but it's a pain to set up sometimes.

Here is the link to download a small sample of what it produces out of the box.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...0SonicDemo.mpg
Maybe that it would be different if I could record on the Internal HDD, the instuctions are pretty vague but normally it uses a special partition type that allows some more functions, notably editing.

I will return the unit this week for exchange but in the meantime I will do more test with what I have.
Next test I will do Is test the SCART output, I have not done that so far. I want to know if you can have lagless RGB monitoring through SCART out.

So far I was using the component out on a CRT tv and not only is there a little lag but the picture is also overscan. To the point I cannot see my health bar in Megaman..
I will try to setup something with my PVM and see if there is a way to get LagLess unscaled RGB output.
The instructions are Vague here once again, they make reference to RGB pass through somewhere.

Talking about the user manual.. I could not find it on the internet before I bought the unit, so I put it on my DropBox:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...rManual-EN.pdf

That's pretty disappointing video quality, unfortunately. The fact that it accepts SCART RGB input had me excited. There's no way to get it to record at a higher quality?

I currently use a DVD recorder and record all of my consoles in s-video, and it looks a little bit better than that but is a PITA. I am trying to find a way to record gameplay footage while skipping the disc-ripping step. I guess I'll keep messing with this Hauppage thingy I bought...

IT looks better with SNES than genesis, there is some kind of artifact that I get from my genesis that is not there with the SNES
Check this out.
https://mega.co.nz/#!w5EXVKzR!p2ntVC...86fiVXnaOiow2E

Edit : Btw this might be a bit dark, becaue I was using a Y scart plitter to monitor without lag.

It looks OK, but not great. I've come to the conclusion that there is just a limit to what you can do quality-wise when recording these older consoles. I've seen video footage of RGB capture cards, and they're still kind of blurry, and frankly don't look any better than the set-up that I use, which as I said is s-video based. Maybe using something like a framemeister and an HD capture device that's designed to record a higher-res, progressive scan signal would produce better results. But I dont think that would really be worth the time and money. I don't think that people watch videos of old gameplay footage expecting perfectly sharp pixels. On the contrary, if things look too good then people think you're using emulation.

I think the main issue with the Markus 750 is that it compresses automatically. You have no control over what type of algorithm it uses. You have like 6 levels of quality and I am using the highest.
This being said all the other RGB capture video I have seen on Youtube and elsewhere do not look that much better.
I do not have a lot of experience with video capture but I tried a S-video capture card that was relatively high end and the result was worse than what I got with the Markus.

At this point I think this unit is rather interesting. It is a cheap HDD recorder, really one of the cheapest you can get, it comes with 1TB+ hdd and offers you RGB capture and easy operation. You have some nice features like watch video on TV from network or record directly on a USB key.
Once everything is setup You just press a button to record. Recording with my computer was a chore. This has the advantage of making it easy.

When you play a game and monitor from the machine, It adds a few frames of lag, which is annoying, even when you use the RGB in and Out. It also outputs everything in 480i, which sucks.
However, I used a Y SCART splitter at the input and could play with no lag on my PVM monitor while the machine recorded.
I observed no difference in the recording when using a Y splitter. The picture on my PVM was a little bit Darker but it was still nice, difference was small. I expected worse honestly.

As to composite recording, so far it sucks. It basically does not work... The picture cannot sync properly, it is noisy and often washed out or black and white.
I tried with SNES and some cheap stand alone console and had same result in both. Unusable composite. That is pretty bad.

Either that is a defect of my unit or it expect PAL. Or maybe or possibly it just sucks.
I will send the unit back this week and get a new one. We shall see if anything is different

So far this unit is a mixed bag, but I think that for the price it is not bad. When I get my replacement units I will run some more test and in the end will write a proper review that I will publish somewhere.

It definitely looks like a neat device. And the video quality that you posted certainly isn't bad at all. I was just hoping for something to replace my current set up, but I think the video quality that I'm getting is about as good as its going to get.