Belkin F5U228 HiSpeed USB 2.0 DVD Creator Review

Overall Rating

When eventually correctly configured, it can encode video from a VHS VCR into various digital formats at acceptable quality.

Supposed to be capable of DVD encoding with a 1GHz P4 processor, but impossible on my 1.7GHz P4. The included Ulead software is 2001 vintage, buggy, over-complicated and not very intuitive. Difficult to get it working.

I was hoping to use this device to transfer my ageing collection of VHS tapes to DVD. Its specs imply that it should have no trouble doing it on my 1.7GHz PC running Windoze XP SP2 with 768MB of RAM.

The first problems I had was no colour in the preview window and no sound. After a lot of wasted time, I finally found the NTSC/PAL selection option hidden in a sub-menu called "Image" and correctly set it for PAL (it defaults to NTSC) to restore the colour. After more wasted time, I discovered that the old Ulead software was confusing my sound card so that muting the line input in 'play' mode was also muting it for recording.

After all that, I tried doing some video encoding. It soon became obvious that there was no way it was ever going to produce DVD resolution transfers. CPU usage was peaking at 100% and producing dropped frames at all resolutions above about 352x240.

I even went as far as re-installing the motherboard chipset drivers in case this was the reason for the poor performance. My hard drive's a new 7200RPM Seagate, which should not cause any problems.

Also the Ulead software has a fatal flaw - if you bring up another window (e.g. Task Manager) while it's running, it's impossible to clear that window which from then on obscures all the Ulead buttons so you have no control over the program. That was the last straw for me.

Overall I'm very disappointed with this device and its software. I'm going to take it back and get a refund.