AVerMediaEZRecorder 330 Green Box 4K Pass-Through and 1080p Recording HDMI Recorder PVR DVR Schedule Recording IR Blaster Editing without PC Easy Installation (ER330G)

This is superb.Audio and picture quality.No problems at all.Stunning.

I'm giving this a 4 star review based on what the product is and its target market despite having returned the item because it wasn't really suitable for my needs.Firstly, this is an non nonsense box for capturing HDMI input and streaming it to YouTube, Facebook or Twitch or recording the footage in very high quality h.265 (or h.264) to local storage.The unit is operated and configured completely by remote control. The remote control requires the connection and placement of an IR sensor which comes on a wire to be connected to the unit. This is so the sensor can be placed away from the box itself but is another cable you're going to have running about the place.The unit is powered by a 12v PSU that comes with the item, not USB-C or something like that, so you will nee a spare power outlet. A HDMI cable is supplied and will provide the connection between your source device (PC, Console etc) and the this recording box.Recording:A SD card or drive is sonnected to the unit as storage medium. This needs to be formatted in exFat. I tried with a 5TB drive and it was unrecognised. I formatted the drive using the on screen menu of the recorder which made the drive recognised but only ended up with 2TB capacity. The Recorder doesn't seem to be capable of formatting above this capacity. I didn't try the SD card but I did try with a 64GB USB stick also which I needed to format exFat on a PC but also worked fine.The device will record to a network shard of a home NAS or something but I didn't try this feature.I only tried h.265 and the quality on both 25MB and 40MB / sec (good and optimal modes) was very very high indeed. However I was experiencing some frame drops / very minor slow down at times and also some very brief but annoying drops from the audio. I noticed that red text on black background (in game, small font) and red text in general was noticeably blocky. I don't know if this i a characteristic of h.265 or not but the small red text in game chat was actually difficult to read (both stream and recording). Otherwise, impeccable video quality.Note: IF THE DEVICE IS RECORDING, IT CANNOT BE STREAMING AT THE SAME TIME.Streaming:This was the main deal breaker for me.The whole streaming config has been simplified so that it works with a remote control to configure it. You have three choices, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. I tested YouTube and Twitter. I also tested with and without a headset attached for recording a mic overlay. Firstly, and this is the deal breaker for me and the main reason I returned the item, the recorder relies on a third party service, hosted by AverMedia to make the connection to all the streaming services. You cannot just give the device your own RTMP url with streaming key. What happens if you "sign in" to a streaming service, which displays an on screen QR code. You need to scan this QR code which will then take you to a URL at avermedia which will then redirect into YouTube or Twitch where you will grant avermedia access to the account (it will give you a number that needs tobe keys into the device using the IR controller). When this is completed you will be "logged in" to the streaming services. So in reality, when you hit the start stream button on the remote, the device calls out to AverMedias service, authenticates with that and gets given a RTMP url with streaming key for which to start streaming to. This also sets the stream title and description (editable either in the devices menu or by hand by logging into YouTube or Twitch) to something pretty basic. Editing this information on the device with the IR control is very time consuming and fiddly.When you're all set up, streaming works and the quality is good. I had to turn up the mic volume quite a bit from the default value when using a headset connected to the box to make sure the mic audio wasn't being drown out by the PC audio but the other option is to lower the volume control on the PC. Make sure the PC is set to send audio output to HDMI by the way (which should be default behaviour anyway).Overall the stream quality was good and for most people this device will be all they need. Simply press the record or stream button and forget about it (until the end where you'll need to press it again to stop).The power light on the front of the device serves as indication to what the device is doing. Solid amber when it's sleeping. Solid blue when it's switched on. Breathing blue when streaming and breathing red when recording.So the reasons I returned the item despite being happy with the record and stream quality are:1) no direct control over streaming service. You cannot input your own RTMP url, so you're stuck with the third party auth method for YouTube, Twitch and Facebook. You CANNOT add other streaming services or simply point the device at a local RTMP server or something like Restream. This means if you want to stream to YouTube and Twitch at the same time, forget about it. The device only streams to one service.2) no recording while streaming. This is a deal breaker. I want to be able to record a high quality local copy of the stream to be edited up and used in a high quality video after the stream has ended. you cannot do this with this box. It's either stream or record, not both.3) I ended up piggy backing another device into the HDMI pass through port of this device so I could do high quality recording to USB drive with the AverMedia box and stream with the other box. That's when I noticed things like playing footage back, the audio was coming out of the headphones connected to the AverMedia device but not coming out of the HDMI a lot of the time.4) OSD / Gaming mode. So the HDMI pass through is a bit weird. By default my 1080p connection to the monitor had some lag to it and there were coloured pixels around some black on white text I knew should just be black pixels on a white background. Difficult to explain but looked like the display was being somehow resampled before being sent to the monitor. It turns out this is what is happening so that the device can give you on screen notifications about when it is recording and streaming and some other things. You can put the device into Gaming mode which then gets rid of the notifications about recording and streaming but is a straight up pass through of the display. No lag, no weird resampling effects. YOU WILL WANT TO KEEP THE DEVICE IN GAMING MODE IF YOU'RE DOING ANY KIND OF GAME STREAMING.Sadly this also means that using the on-screen menu flips back from direct pass through to the overlay mode which resets the HDMI output. So this is where I was getting all sorts of weird problems. I would be using another hardware streaming box to stream from running from the hdmi pass through on the AverMedia box. I would go into a menu and come back out of the menu in the AverMedia box and then lose all audio to the second streaming box until I disconnected the PC hdmi and reconnected it again with the AverMedia box back in Gamermode pass through. This switching into the menu and back, because it resets the hdmi signal, also caused problems with the streaming out of the second box so I had to remember not to use the menus at all when streaming with this configuration - however this is probably an unlikely scenario to find yourself in.I did do some more testing with just the AverMedia box between the PC and the Monitor and again, noticed media playback (playing back recordings) audio was not always coming out of the HDMI output and sometimes I managed to have the PC lose audio to the monitor. The PC was always using the HDMI as the audio output at these times so was definitely something to do with the AverMedia box - however, this is edge case stuff you probably won't encounter.Also the streaming services can be set to three predefined bit rates. Good / Optimal, etc. I think Twitch is set to 6Mbps at Optimal but you do not have a say over the audio encoding bitrate which I think is set to 128kbps with no option to change it. This could be a problem for some people.So all in conclusion. This is a great little box for recording OR streaming (not both at the same time) to Twitch, YouTube or Facebook (but only one at a time) and no other streaming services.This might be a good thing if you want a plug and play device you can switch on and off and forget about.One other really useful thing is the ability to plug a headset directly into the device. This means you can hear the game audio as it passes through and the stream / recording can have your microphone recorded over the top of it. You can switch the mic recording on and off in the menu. If you're buying this for a kid then it's going to be the best option for minimising wires and other faff. However, if they're playing on console with headset and voice chat you might need to think of another way of getting the mic into the unit as voice will not come out of the HDMI output of the console. Maybe get a headset splitter cable (one that turns the headset port into a separate mic and earphones socket) and a 3.5mm lavalier microphone to clip on to the existing headset microphone or something like that (effectively a two mic solution).If you're happy with this then it really is a high quality stream (with minor occasional audio drops from my experience) and is easy to use and probably worth every penny.for my use case I needed flexibility that I assumed the device would offer but didn't, so it's been returned. If you're wanting an easy way to stream to YouTube and Twitch and maybe also record at the same time then look elsewhere. And obviously I have concerns about introducing a third party service to perform the authentication and pass back the RTMP URL to the device. It seems an unnecessary step which might not be future-proof if and when changes to these streaming services happen. I'd expect to at least have the option to input my own RTMP URL.I've ordered a better PC capture card and am moving back to using OBS with a plugin that lets me encode to both YouTube and Twitch at the same time.