Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsI cannot recommend enough that you avoid this product
Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2020
If you are a content creator of any stripe, whether it's streaming to thousands of people a day or just recording video for your friends, I cannot recommend this product in any way, shape, or form.
Issues:
- Razer does not have their own capture software designed to work with this product. You will need to use another capture program like OBS or XSplit.
- Passthrough doesn't work unless the unit has power, so you can't leave it in line without your computer being powered on.
- Razer makes it sound like setup is a breeze but if you are not familiar with capture software, you are in for a bumpy ride - this is absolutely not a plug and play product for novices, despite what the instructions and marketing material suggests. I spent a solid hour and a half trying to figure out why audio was not being captured. Instead of passing audio through the device, the Ripsaw creates a virtual channel on your PC and you have to be sure to capture *that*, too. This is not covered in the included instructions. Don't understand video/audio sources in OBS? It'll probably take you a lot longer to figure that out.
- Once you've captured the audio source, you might find the output is incredibly quiet. This is because the virtual channel defaults to about half volume in Windows 10. So you'll need to go into your audio recording sources and manually adjust the output in there too. This is not covered in the included instructions. I had to spent a half hour trawling Reddit to find that piece of troubleshooting advice.
- You've got your audio and your video captured. Finally! It looks great! Until you record or stream anything over ten minutes. The audio and video RAPIDLY go out of sync, and no matter what settings I changed in OBS, no matter whether I recorded to an external drive or an internal M.2 drive, no matter how much I adjusted the video quality or the audio settings, the loss of sync is consistent. Occasionally the video will stutter which for live streaming is completely unacceptable. I tested this on both a high end desktop and a high end laptop and it happened every single freaking time.
- Want to record your comms on a console? You'll need an extra mic to connect directly to the device to record your own voice, and if you have a wireless headset that is now rendered useless (at least on PS4) because the PS4 does not allow you to send your audio to your headset and through the HDMI simultaneously. You'll need to run a cable from your headset to the unit. Granted this is not entirely a Ripsaw problem, but the implementation requires more components than is provided in the unit. Prepare to shell out extra for additional devices.
I am not in the habit of leaving negative reviews on products that frustrate me, because life is too short - but given how many people are taking up streaming and looking for an easy way to get started, I can't recommend that you go this route. You will be consistently dissatisfied and frustrated. As someone experienced with content creation, familiar with OBS, Twitch streaming AND computer literate, I spent hours of my day messing with this thing to get it even vaguely functional. If you are just starting out, go with another product. I'm just going to wait for the Elgato HD60S+ - I had a lot of success and zero issues with the HD60S and this product is a good reminder of why Elgato have become the market leaders.
Super disappointing. I expected a lot better from Razer.