Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

UPDATED May 18, 2013: I originally wrote this review in October 2009 (over 3.5 years ago), and was reporting on my experiences using it with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo 15" MacBook Pro, which is much older and slower than the machines most people have today. Others have reported that it works better on more modern hardware (i.e., anything with a Core i5/i7 CPU). I ended up returning it, so I can't say. I found that the Blackmagic Design Video Recorded linked below worked much better for me, although it's twice the price of this device. Elgato markets this as a H.264 capture device, but they only mention in the fine print (and nowhere on the Amazon page) that it does NOT include a hardware H.264 encoder. Instead, it uses your Mac's CPU to encode the video. This leads to two problems: first, your computer is basically useless for anything else while you're capturing video; and second, if your Mac isn't fast enough, it has to fall back to the lower quality (and less CPU-intensive) MPEG-4 codec. When I purchased this, Elgato's web site stated that H.264 was supported on machines with a 2.0 GHz Core2 Duo or better. In the latest 1.0.1 software update, they have revised this to a 2.33 GHz Core2 Duo, which puts my 2.2 GHz Core2 Duo MacBook Pro on the wrong side of the line. In addition, this device is very pricey for a software-only encoder -- there are other products available (albeit without Mac support) for a quarter of the price of this product that do video capture with software encoding. The final nail in the coffin is that even encoding in MPEG-4, the video captured with this device has frequent frame drops and glitches, which makes the recordings unusable. I've wasted over an hour recording video that I had to throw away because of frame drops. For those that say it's "okay" because the frame drops are infrequent, I disagree -- I'm not willing to audit hours of captured video to find the places where it dropped frames and re-record those segments. I'm going to be sending this back and trying either the Blackmagic Design H.264 Format Video Recorder (which does encode in hardware) or the Hauppauge 1212 HD-PVR High Definition Personal Video Recorder. Both of these are more expensive than the Elgato, but I'd rather pay more for something that works.