@Taffelost My PC is in a 50lb chassis and weighs a total of about 65lbs. I don't really want to lug my PC downstairs and hook it up to the home theater every time I decide I want to play a console game for awhile.

@micahspringer You didn't factor into the PC the fact that many capture software is very poor and produces poor results. Also, that since you'd almost certainly want lossless video that you could then later edit (something, sadly, these console plug-in devices do not do, either), then you need a lot of storage. And that storage needs to be fast. Otherwise, you're going to either have useless choppy video or a useless choppy game. Same goes for the other route -- ditching the storage space and speed and going with on-the-fly encoding. Unfortunately, that chews up CPU and renders a file that is no longer lossless and will be even more reduced when further edited.

Either way, you're looking at a performance hit. Even with a system like mine (2560x1600 display with dual 670 4GB cards in SLI, an i7-3770k and 16gb ram and Samsung 830 SSD). You will either need to spend about $400 to get about half a terabyte's worth of fast SSDs for writing the video to or you will need to buy a bunch of SATA drives and RAID them. Either proposition is going to be expensive, if you want enough space that you can store all that lossless data (easily 100mbps, for 2560x1600@30fps) without having to stop your gaming while you deal with moving that data slowly to some other place and encoding it before it piles up every couple hours.

Also, "moving to 1440p standard within the next 18 months". Color me unimpressed. I don't want shitty 16:9 on my PC. I want 16:0, like I've had for over a decade. And I don't want "2560x1440". That's shitty. I want my full 2560x1600.

Oh, and back to the software -- a lot of it is very poor and has a lot of limitations. FRAPs is a great example of that. Your best bet is to use a combination of Dxtory (it's about $50 and written by a guy in Japan) with the lagarith codec (for a lossless format, it produces more reasonable quality and size than a lot of alternatives).

Of course, the ultimate solution would be to buy a Black Magic Intensity Pro card and stick that in your PC. Or in a second PC that is small enough to cart around both for your console gaming and your PC gaming. Fill it full of drives (I believe they recommend something like 8-16 SATA drives in RAID) and run an HDMI connection to it from your gaming PC or console. Then again, you're looking at more money. Aside from the storage and the rest of the system, the card is about $200 (but it's pretty fantastic).

The real benefit I see of these devices is that they do the encoding on the fly, so you can then use a huge drive on even a laptop to write the data to while gaming and because the encoding and storage are all offloaded (to the pass-through encoder and then the drive on your laptop) and not impact the performance of your gaming systems. (Although I still prefer going with lossless so I can later do whatever magic I want to with h264 and audio encoding on my own, instead of their limited implementations).

Anyway, in the long run, there are just a lot of poor solutions and not really any great ones. Unless you want to drop real money on it. And I mean ~$20k USD for a tricaster or similar.

@kingoftitans Are you retarded? Pakistan was harboring OSAMA BIN LADEN. Not only that, but they were doing it just blocks from a massive military training compound.

Why are consumers freaking out over an INDUSTRY PROFESSIONAL expo being changed?! Despite how it may have been presented in the last three years, it is an INDUSTRY show. Every industry has one. It isn't for consumers. It shouldn't be for consumers. It should be a show for industry professionals to show and view each other's stuff. If you want the consumer stuff, go check out games at CES.