Month: December 2019

The new device would up the ante over the Live Gamer Ultra by supporting 4K HDR recording at up to 60 fps.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas kicks off next month, and that means a whole bunch of product announcements are right around the corner. Presumably, one of them will be a new external capture device with support for recording 4K HDR streams at 60 frames per second.

AverMedia teased the pending announcement on Twitter. The company didn’t specifically say that the unveiling will take place at CES, only that it’s slated for 2020. However, we’d be surprised if the annual event came and went without a formal announcement.

In the meantime, we have this Twitter post to whet our appetite:

AverMedia is one of the bigger players in the streaming hardware space, with its Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus being one of the best capture cards for PC gaming. It has a 4K pass-through, but limits recordings to 1080p at 60fps.

While we have to wait a few weeks for more details, it seems AverMedia is readying what would essentially be an upgraded version of its Live Gamer Ultra, introduced last year. The Live Gamer Ultra also boasts support for recording 4K HDR streams, but tops out at 30 fps in that mode. Or you can opt for higher playable framerates, up to 240 fps at 1080p (recorded at 120 fps, or 60fps HDR).

It will be interesting to see how the entire feature-set of the upcoming external capture card compares, both to AverMedia’s existing product stack and what Elgato (owned by Corsair) offers.

It will require a moderately powerful PC. For reference, AverMedia recommends a desktop with at least a Core i5-6xxx processor and GeForce GTX 1060 GPU for the Live Gamer Ultra, or if plugging into a laptop, a Core i7-7700HQ and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. And for connecting it to the your desktop or laptop, you need a USB 3.1 Gen1 (5Gbps) cable. That might get bumped up to a Gen2 (10Gbps) on the upcoming card, but we’ll have to wait and see.

PITY ABOUT THOSE 4K RESULTS THOUGH

Lexar has moved into the NVMe SSD market with the release of their NM600 line, with 480GB and 240GB models. Inside you will find Micron 64-layer 3D TLC flash and Silicon Motion’s SM2263XT controller, fairly familiar to those keeping up with PCIe 3.0 SSDs. At $67 for the 480GB model and $40 for the 240GB you can afford to pick one up for someone you know that still hasn’t experienced what an NVMe drive can do.

Kitguru’s testing of this cacheless drive showed the expected performance in the vast majority of testing, apart from the 4K tests which only reached 132,115 IOPS for reads and 53,747 IOPS for writes at a queue depth of four, well below the rated specs. It is worth noting that when they increased the queue depth to eight the drive met or beat the advertised IOPS.

Probably better known for their comprehensive range of memory cards, Lexar also has a range of SSDs in M.2 NVMe, M.2 SATA and 2.5in SATA formats. The current flagship of the NVMe M.2 range is the NM600, using a combination of a Silicon Motion controller and Micron 3D TLC NAND.

After years of using mostly stock-Android phones, I bought a Galaxy S10e for myself a few months ago, and I’ve used it almost every day since that point. While the software experience isn’t perfect, Samsung does usually provide options to disable functionality I don’t care for. However, there’s one software quirk that can’t easily be fixed: screenshots are constantly backed up to my Google Photos library.

I’m sure every Samsung phone owner is thinking “welcome to the club” right about now, but for those of you unaware of this absurd behavior, allow me to elaborate. By default, Android stores photos taken with the camera in the ‘DCIM’ folder (short for Digital Camera IMages) of your device’s internal storage. Screenshots are saved in a sub-folder of a completely separate ‘Pictures’ directory. Makes sense.

Samsung changes this behavior on its phones and tablets by placing screenshots in a sub-folder of the DCIM directory. My best guess is that this is done to make life easier for iPhone converts, since iOS shows both camera photos and screenshots in the same ‘Recents’ menu of the Photos app.

This change causes most apps that scan for new photos, including Google Photos, to recognize screenshots as new images. While you can exclude certain folders from Google Photos backups, you can’t exclude sub-folders of the DCIM directory. There’s also no setting in Samsung phones to change where screenshots are stored. While hacks are available that can mitigate this issue to some extent, like PinSync, the only “fix” that is guaranteed to work is to search for “Screenshots” in Google Photos every once in a while and delete the results.

This is by no means a new problem. There have been complaints for years about screenshots being backed up against the wishes of device owners, but the functionality has remained consistent. Even Samsung’s recent One UI overhaul didn’t put the Screenshots folder back to the default location.

There could be many potential fixes to this issue. Samsung could add an option to move the Screenshots folder, or perhaps Google Photos could add support for excluding DCIM sub-folders. Ideally, Samsung and Google could work together on a fix, but this is still something that could be done without the participation of both parties.

The holiday season is coming to an end, but I do have a belated Christmas wish: Samsung and Google, please let me exclude screenshots from my Google Photos backups. Please. My library is filled with hundreds of random screenshots I took while writing articles and guides.

Earlier this year, Google Chrome officially launched tab groups on Android, confirming the change from the classic tab switcher to the new grid-based design. Google’s next step for their mobile browser is to integrate Tab Groups into Chrome for Android’s recent “Duet” redesign.

As it stands today, Chrome for Android’s tab groups UI uses a bar along the bottom of the screen to allow you to quickly switch among your current group of tabs. At the same time, Chrome for Android’s “Duet” redesign moves the browser’s UI from the top of the screen to the bottom.

As both of these features seem to be here to stay, Google needed to find a clean way to combine the two, rather than running two distinct toolbars at the bottom of your screen. A new flag in Chrome for Android, currently available in Dev and Canary, brings tab groups to Duet in a much smaller UI.

Duet-TabStrip Integration

Allows users to access integration of Duet and TabStrip.

#enable-duet-tabstrip-integration

The new experimental UI takes the “strip” of favicons from tab groups and lets it float just above the tab count button. On the same strip, you’ll see a plus (+) icon to add a new tab to the group and a down arrow to hide the strip.

Once the strip has been hidden, you can open it again by long-pressing on the tab count. As you add more tabs to your group, the strip gets wider to compensate and allows you to scroll once you’ve run out of room.

The biggest problem with this tab strip design though is that there’s no easy way to distinguish between two tabs that have the same favicon. If you forget what order your tabs are in, you can end up wildly swapping around to find the right one. Thankfully, you can still preview each tab’s title and thumbnail from the main tab switcher UI.

Bigger isn’t always better, though when it comes to gaming monitors, I’d argue that staring at a larger display is more enjoyable than looking at a smaller one, even if only at 1080p. If you agree, then check out MSI’s 27-inch Optix MAG270VC. It’s on sale at Best Buy for $199.99, which is $100 below its list price.

Sure, a 27-inch panel is a good fit for 1440p, but if you’re not looking to spend a premium for a higher resolution and still want a larger monitor, this one fits the bill. It’s the same size an resolution as the Pixio PXC273, which we consider one of the best gaming monitors. This deal also brings pricing parity between the two, and MSI is a more recognizable brand.

This monitor is built around a curved VA panel with a fast 144Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time (MPRT). Given that 1080p is not super demanding on hardware, this is a great candidate for games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and less demanding games in general, where speed matters.

Viewing angles are on par with a typical IPS display (178 degrees horizontal and vertical), while the 3,000:1 contrast ratio (100,000,000:1) is better than most. MSI also claims 110 percent coverage of the sRGB color space, which indicates a relatively high color gamut.

FreeSync is supported here as well, to smooth out the action if you own a compatible Radeon graphics card. Bottom line—this is a nice price on a fast display.