The future of 'Irregular Slice of STG Life.'

As most of you know, I announced on twitter that I temporarily halted all future broadcasts on Livestream because I had sold my Hauppauge HD-PVR. It was the only capture unit I had that was able to record console gameplay footage at 720p 60FPS (encoded with H.264 to boot).

Unfortunately, for me to broadcast console stuff, I had to hook my console up via Component, which is amazing, but it meant I had to use my HDTV, which meant I had slight display lag, which also meant I almost wasn't able to play anything at peak performance. This was pretty much the reason I had to sell it. It's been one of the best capture units I had and I highly recommend it.

Hopefully tomorrow, I'll be able to grab something even better: the Blackmagic Intensity Pro. This baby will record 1080p@60FPS via HDMI, and just like the HD-PVR, it'll have a pass-through connection so I can play through my monitor (which has extremely minimal display lag) while being able to record at the same time.

The only trade-off is that everything I record will be uncompressed so recording at 1080p is going to take off huge chunks of HDD space. Thankfully there's VirtualDub for that.

On the much brighter side, it seems a lot of programs can pick up the video signal from the Intensity Pro as a 'camera'. This was something I was not able to do with the HD-PVR. When I broadcasted through Livestream, I had to record over a certain region of the desktop screen; particularly the output window of the program that utilized the HD-PVR recording. What does it mean when I can broadcast directly from the capture unit? Expect the migration from Livestream to ustream/justin.tv relatively soon.

Stay tuned.