This dvr claims to record from any source to a pen drive, is it any good?

[ezcapper]

so are you saying the sandisk extreme I ordered will fix my recording problems?

[SHS]

so are you saying the sandisk extreme I ordered will fix my recording problems?

That I don't know but any thing possable

[ezcapper]

Just to clear up whether the yk918h and the HDMI-Cloner Box are the same device or not, here is an excerpt from the yk918h manual. Click the picture to download. You can download the HDMI-Cloner Box manual from cloneralliance's website and compare.

[ezcapper]

I don't know if this is for the brave or stupid, but just found out that there is an upgrade to the yk918h called the yk919h. This is the same price as the HDMI-Cloner Box that amazon lists, but it has hdmi, component and composite inputs. Since cloner-alliance's firmware has different models listed, I'm assuming it will work on this device as well. If anyone wants to throw $100 at it, let us know how it turns out. One thing I have noticed, is that the yk918h video quality is light years better than avermedia's lgp lite, which i have.
yk919h link:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/YK919H-HDMI-Converter-AV-HD-Capture-Box-For-PS4-Xbox-Blu-ray-D...item51c6831f38
comes with 30 day money back satisfaction guarantee.

[ezcapper]

ok, so my sandisk extreme did not like the box and had the same type of errors. I have a hello kitty 8gb usb drive I got off of ebay because it was the cheapest one on the site. I have tried 2 recordings so far with it. The first one was fat32. It makes 2 of the 2gb files, but once it reached that 4gb fat32 limit, it stops recording and they are 2 normal files and 2 additional files of 0 kb. I thought "oh great, it's time to throw away the piece of junk". As a last ditch effort, I reformatted the drive to ntfs and changed the setting on the box to 720p, hoping to get a little farther on the next recording before everything would crash and leave me with nothing like before. However, this is not what happened.

It recorded one unsplit file to the capacity of the drive (7.34gb), leaving <60 mb unused. The recording looks and sounds great, the specs are below. Now for the next test, I'm hoping to switch to 1080p, and make 10 7+gb recordings in a row without a failure, then I think the box will not be a complete failure in my eyes. Obviously I'm using the new firmware. I wonder why it doesn't like sandisk drives? So far yk918h + hello kitty bracelet usb + new firmware + ntsc format = success for me. I will post back when I figure out if it is consistant success or not.

file specs
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media
Codec ID : isom
File size : 7.35 GiB
Duration : 1h 43mn
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 10.2 Mbps

[Video] ID : 2
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : Baseline@L3.1
Format settings, CABAC : No
Format settings, ReFrames : 1 frame
Format settings, GOP : M=1, N=120
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration : 1h 43mn
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 9 955 Kbps
Width : 1 280 pixels
Height : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 59.940 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.180
Stream size : 7.20 GiB (98%)
Language : English

[Audio] ID : 1
Format : AAC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec
Format profile : LC
Codec ID : 40
Duration : 1h 43mn
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 192 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : Front: L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 140 MiB (2%)
Language : English

[SHS]

what kind of error with sandisk extreme and just wonderign what size what it
You want check with app called BootIce make sure there are no other partition it my cuases problem.

[ezcapper]

Thanks shs that helped. I used bootice to format SanDisk to usb-hdd and it let me record 9.92 gb 2+ hours but then failed. Led on box went out, which only should happen when drive is full

[ezcapper]

The god awful seller finally sent me the official firmware. Maybe download this in case you purchase the yk918h in the future. If you do, avoid purchasing from the seller futuretrend at all cost. The file should be up for 10 days. The cloneralliance website has directions on how to install it. It pretty much looks like the same file and filesize to me
http://www.filedropper.com/161455jedi
Here are the chinese instructions to upgrade the firmware with english translation
http://bit.ly/1Trbash

[jagabo]

The god awful seller finally sent me the official firmware.

Does it work?

[mail2tom]

The god awful seller finally sent me the official firmware. Maybe download this in case you purchase the yk918h in the future. If you do, avoid purchasing from the seller futuretrend at all cost. The file should be up for 10 days. The cloneralliance website has directions on how to install it. It pretty much looks like the same file and filesize to me
http://www.filedropper.com/161455jedi
Here are the chinese instructions to upgrade the firmware with english translation
http://bit.ly/1Trbash

Firmware link is dead.

[jagabo]

Firmware link is dead.

Worked for me.

[ezcapper]

The god awful seller finally sent me the official firmware.

Does it work?

Honestly, I sold it on craigslist as a broken device. Luckily someone was still willing to pay full price. I have emailed him the link if he wants to try it.

[ezcapper]

[Attachment 32516 - Click to enlarge]

The god awful seller finally sent me the official firmware. Maybe download this in case you purchase the yk918h in the future. If you do, avoid purchasing from the seller futuretrend at all cost. The file should be up for 10 days. The cloneralliance website has directions on how to install it. It pretty much looks like the same file and filesize to me
http://www.filedropper.com/161455jedi
Here are the chinese instructions to upgrade the firmware with english translation
http://bit.ly/1Trbash

Firmware link is dead.

I started uploading a youtube video on how to download the file, it should be up in 30 minutes or so
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97ld_1_FL4Q&feature=youtu.be

[ezcapper]

The guy who sold me the box wants to return it to me, so I'll test the new firmware today, recording to this hard drive:
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST31000340NS-Barracuda-Internal-3-0-Gb/dp/B0027IGKV6

[ezcapper]

ok recording to hard drive was no go. But split files at 2gb and worked perfectly with usb stick. In theory, splitting the files sounds like a disadvantage, but in practice, I've realized it is a huge advantage over having just one file. The split is similar to how a dvd splits vob files, so you cannot detect any stuttering or missing frames with the naked eye. Once joined, it is fluid motion like the files were never split, I used avidemux and tested on a high motion sports clip. The split was in the middle of the motion. Watched the clip several times.

The 2gb limit makes the files much more portable, editable, and playable in a media player with the full features like skipping to a future frame, etc. A 9 gb file will just hang in avidemux on a slow computer, and skipping forward in vlc will take time to render the scene. For many people, including myself, files bigger than 7 gb are useless unless they are the final product. But these shorter files are much easier to manage, there are no disadvantages for me. It's just basically like a next generation vob file.

Happy with the purchase overall I guess. I'm surprised, I guess it is not the exact same box as the hdmi cloner box.

I'm uploading an hour of the movie Valkamma to Google Drive in a form that will be downloadable. You can compare it to the actual file. The capture was from my computer screen

actual file:
http://www.valkaama.com/download.php?target=media/movie/Valkaama_720p.mkv

yk918h capture (3 part zip file):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B695hmOChptNcjloWWhsVGZ5bW8/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B695hmOChptNMjhIMWxsZG9FeWs/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B695hmOChptNZVZCY3hmT3kwRE0/view?usp=sharing

The last thing I have to say is that I would guess that this cannot capture from a 3d blu ray player due to hdmi 1.4 specs, but cannot say for sure. That's is just a guess. Okay, the last 75 posts are all I know about the device, that's all I have to say, hope it helps someone.

Basic one line opinion: At the $50 USD price point. This is the best capture card you can buy. Good, easy one click pc free recording. If anyone wants me to repost the Chinese firmware upgrade, just let me know.

[ezcapper]

I added the test capture files to the above post. You can download the clip now if you want.

[jagabo]

Does it automatically deinterlace when capturing an interlaced source? If so, is there any way to prevent it from doing that?

BTW, thanks for the samples.

[ezcapper]

It does automatically deinterlace, there is no way to stop it from doing that.

[jagabo]

It does automatically deinterlace, there is no way to stop it from doing that.

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, that makes it useless to me.

After looking at your recorded sample: there is a significant loss of detail, especially during motion. This isn't much different that other hardware h.264 capture devices. Colors and levels are a little off (mostly a rec.601 vs rec.709 problem) but it's not clear now much of that was caused by playback on your computer vs. in the capture device.

The source video and captured video are both 1280x720. Was your computer playing at that resolution too? Or was it upscaling to 1080p and the capture device downscaling to 720p?

[ezcapper]

the computer monitor resolution was 1280x720

[jagabo]

Thanks.

[ezcapper]

ok misinformation a few posts ago. It does record to the harddrive mentioned previously. The harddrive just takes a few seconds to get ready, then it seems to work fine. When my test recording is finished I'll check to see how it turns out, if the write speed is fast enough.

Hard drive:
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST31000340NS-Barracuda-Internal-3-0-Gb/dp/B0027IGKV6

[jagabo]

Even at the slow end write speed on a hard drive is around 40 MB/s. That's far more than is need for a device that's writing a 2 MB/s video.

[ezcapper]

Even at the slow end write speed on a hard drive is around 40 MB/s. That's far more than is need for a device that's writing a 2 MB/s video.

You're right, it works. The write speed of the drive is around 40 mbps. This is helpful for me because I can leave the recorder on all day and then just erase the files I don't need easily. They are labeled similar to how the zip file I uploaded was labeled.

[Clydesdale]

I bought the Cloner Alliance device a week ago. It records fine to usb stick. But when I connect the hdmi out to my video card's hdmi in there is video but no audio...original source is cable stb.

[ezcapper]

you have to change the default playback audio device. On the yk918h, a device calls suntech pvr appears next to the stereo speakers in windows when it is plugged in, you select it. It is probably the same with the clonerbox. I will make a youtube video shortly.

If recording to cable stb, you should be able to hook up directly to stb, video card hdmi out is for screen recordings I think, but might be misunderstanding you

the youtube video will be up in an hour at this address:
http://youtu.be/jGk9G9uQlqo

If you are advanced in computers, there is a more complicated way where you can use the "listen to this device" feature with the stereomix to have the sound be directed to your speakers and the recording box. go to the stereomix properties and select "listen to this device." Choose the option to listen to the device through your speakers. Then set the default audio device as the suntech pvr or whatever it's called. The stereomix will play through the speakers and the direct audio will go to the box.

I am having trouble changing the resolution on my computer. Can someone test and see if the box records a 960x540 input resolution? I know it can record the other weird resolutions I have thrown at it.

[SHS]

You can have your Cake and Fosting to as all you need do just enable Stereo Mix
http://www.shspvr.com/howto/spdif-optical/spdif.html

[ezcapper]

wow you're forum looks great shs

[Clydesdale]

I fixed this problem. The default audio-in setting on my video card was set for Line-In. I changed it to HDMI and everything is working fine now. Thanks for helping me think this through.

[ezcapper]

Just saw a guy on craigslist selling a brand new one HDMI Cloner-box for $89, he said he will ship to anywhere in the US. I'm tempted, but don't think it's enough of an upgrade to the yk918h. What would you recommend Clydesdale since you own it?

http://southbend.craigslist.org/ele/5131194743.html