Pros: I thought the zero-lag was marketing speak, but it's true. quite nice for realtime gaming. I've been using it for capturing video for a long time now, and the quality is acceptable if you manage to configure the software right. It was easy to install and use, and though I haven't used anything other than component for video, it's nice to know that it can support others too. The back of the card isn't a mess either; I like the idea behind the fancy cable.

Cons: The embedded software it came with is one of the worst pieces of software I've used: it has custom widgets for things like text and number entry that don't work right (you can't select, cut, copy or paste text), and it installs three system services that launch at boot that you have to disable, though launching the software will pop up a dialog telling you to enable them. When it fails to encode video in real-time, it will just start dropping both audio and video. Bad. The defaults it comes with (MPEG-2 video) produce videos with more artifacts than Egyptian Museum of artifacts. Setting it to use H.264 increases video quality dramatically, but you have to play around with the bitrates manually, using the annoying text entry widgets described above. I don't think the card has an H.264 encoder on-board, so I would really like it if I could have more control over the encoding process. The lack of OS X and Linux drivers is understandable, but disappointing.

Overall Review: If AverMedia updated their software so that it wasn't a giant pile, it wouldn't be so bad. I'd like to see some standardized widgets, along with a much interface to control how my video is encoded. If they fixed the recorder so that it would emit blank frames instead of dropping them, I at least have audio. Humans are a lot more sensitive to hiccups in audio than video, so I could simply detect black frames and replace them with the frame before it in post. If they could convince their supplier to release data sheets for their capture hardware, I'm sure the open-source community would create Linux and OS X drivers for them.