Geniatech iGrabber One Touch Video Grabber For MAC and PC, Push Button Recording

I bought this item in order to digitize some old VHS tapes of our wedding, some Hi-8 home videos of our travels, and some exercise tapes my wife wants to play from her laptop instead of a VCR. The item is very basic but provides the necessary connections to hook up our VCR to import the video footage. One of the interesting features is that it can automatically detect and work with just about any video format such as NTSC, PAL and SECAM, which is great if you have videos in more than one format. Here is the breakdown of my own experience with this product:

PACKAGING:

Professional package containing the iGrabber device, instructions, and a software installation CD-ROM. The instructions had a lot of screenshots and not much text information available for each step, but was sufficient enough for me.

INSTALLATION:

Big Problem: The software does not readily install on a Macintosh because the vendor improperly packaged the installation program instead some error (-1) appears and the installation fails.

The Solution: Locate the Installer Package and choose Show Package Contents (right-click to see this option), you will see another package inside it with the same name pop up in a new window. Double click on that inner package item and all works as it should. The company should fix the Package within a Package problem as the average user won't figure out how to get it to install.

PERFORMANCE:

The iGrabber performed very admirably for a product at any price. I am able to import VHS and 8mm Camera video at full resolution and full frame rate with no problems. The software does sometimes have a hiccup starting the second or later recording but is resolved by restarting the application. I can accept that in a $30 product. When the software is running, you can see the video and hear the audio in the application window. Simply press the button on the iGrabber to instantly initiate the video capture process and click your mouse in a special window that pops up to stop the recording when done. When capturing video, you may not hear the audio and the preview window will not update in realtime anymore this is normal and won't affect the quality of the video you are capturing. You can choose the video/audio format for compression, the directory location for automatic file creation, the resolution of the video being captured, and you can tweak tint, contrast, brightness, white and black levels, too. All the various settings are remembered each time you use the program.

** IT IS VERY IMPORTANT that your hard drive be able to keep up with the video/audio stream or the audio WILL get out of sync badly because of hanging, jerky video output. My internal drive was an SSD that had slow write performance and was not able to keep up with the 6Mbps H.264 file being created. I used the external drive I use for Time Machine backups and had perfect performance and no audio sync issues when using that fast media to create the MP4/H.264/AIC video files on. **

This software does not have any way to crop the video you are capturing, therefore, I recommend that you capture the video at full size and frame rate using the Apple Intermediate Codec (uses between 15-20Mbps, and then use another software program to edit, crop, and otherwise transcode into the format you want for the highest quality final project files. Wondershare Video to iPod (or Video Converter for Mac) is a good suite I use for just that purpose that was developed for Mac OS X.

OVERALL:

For the price, you can't beat this product. It could use some polishing and some bug fixing, however, it is very usable in its current form. It exposes numerous codecs for compressing the video and audio. I recommend H.264, MPEG 4, or the Apple Intermediate Codec for the video and uncompressed 16-bit, 48kHz audio. Slow or fragmented Hard Drives or SSD's with slow write speed will cause problems with this product where the audio gets out of sync and the video is not smooth, so make sure your system is fast enough to handle the data stream. There are many settings you will have to explore and tinker with on your own as the documentation is extremely limited and lacking and from other reviews, support is nearly non-existent. The user interface and menus are fairly intuitive.

This came with a CD that does not include the correct drivers for a Mac (and yes, I have TWO Macs that are supposedly compatible with the software). Actually, I don't know that, because the CD won't even open.

After scouring online for the MyGica website (do NOT search iGrabber, search "MyGica"), I finally found the drivers--they hide it very well. Click the link "Video Capture" on the Left Hand side of the screen, and you will see a download for Mac.

The other problem is that once I installed the software and was asked for a serial number, the serial number to use was NOT the one they said to enter on their website! I was sweating bullets, repeatedly entering a serial number from the CD sleeve that did not work (I didn't want to have to pay postage to send it back AND a restocking fee).

Finally, I tried the serial number they said NOT to use and it worked! Jeesh!

In response to a comment --->>>***AGAIN. Do NOT follow their directions. Try any of the serial numbers you see on all the packaging. One of them will work.

Finally, if you have a Mac with a built-in camera, once you hook up the VCR and open iGrabber, go to the top menu, click on "Digitizers," and select "iGrabber."

Supposedly (after extensive research on the web), setting your Video Setting to capture as JPEG is the most reasonable capture option. And warning--test the Sound!! Increase your Gain (under the Sound (Audio) Settings) if the sound is coming out too low from your computer.

Do not expect amazing Hi-Def results from the video you've captured--not gonna happen. Artifacts will appear on the bottom of the digitized video, and I don't know if that happens with every digitizer out there or not.

It would have been REALLY NICE if the company had included a manual that was actually helpful. Why did I have to figure out all this stuff from trial and error?

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I needed to transfer some old Hi-8 video and VHS to my computer. I found this and thought I'd give it a try as it was the least expensive of the options I had found. Set up took under 3 minutes. There is no manual, just a read me file (where obviously English was not a first language) but it is pretty self explanatory.

So far I have digitized one 2 hour tape from an old Sony Hi-8 (circa 1996). The video on the screen during the transfer is VERY shaky and grainy but when you're done and play it back the video is just fine. I had no issues with quality or sound on the one tape I transferred. I did not adjust ANY of the settings in the software.

Then I imported the video to iMovie and it all seems to be working fine and the quality appears to be the same as the original. (Maybe a tad bit better). I also ran other small programs (iCal, Firefox) during the transfer with no apparent issues. I'm running 10.5.8 on a 2.66GHz iMac with 2GB RAM, so nothing fancy.

It does exactly what it is supposed to do at a great price.

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I received the unit earlier than expected. The packaging was great and the item was as expected, until I attempted to install. The installation DVD would not work on my mac due to an error that told me the install DVD was damaged. The Windows drivers are included and worked fine after what seemed to be a lengthy install. After searching through the very poor manual that was included, and all of the installation files, I had to exhaustively search online for the mac driver only to find it under a completely different manufacturer name. The product now works but only after finding the correct drivers. Support for this product is non existent, so if you have trouble, you need to go search for the mygica website, not the name igrabber as expected.

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I was fixing to spend more than $100 on a USB video capture device for mac. I'm very glad I did more research and ran into the iGrabber for Mac. For the price it did so much more than I expected. It performs well and let's you choose your video and audio settings before you record. I simply recorded what I wanted, then I uploaded it into iMovie to edit, and turned my VHS cassettes into DVDs.

Excellent device at an excellent price.