Back in November 2012 I bought what is, for me, a high-end gaming laptop. Along with playing games, I like to capture the footage of games I’m playing for later editing and uploading to YouTube. While the laptop I bought was more than adequate to run the games I wanted to play at 1080p, using screen recording utilities like FRAPS usually forced me to bump the resolution down to 1600×900 in order to maintain frame rates of 30fps.
I could live with that, but then I started seeing reviews of the Avermedia Live Gamer Pro start showing up on YouTube and gaming sites. The LGP is an external video capture devices that is a little bigger than an iPod Touch. As you can see from the photo below, the device has HDMI in/out, 3.5mm audio in/out, and a PS3 video-in port that connects to the respective inputs/outputs for your setup.
There are other external capture devices out there, but there are two things that set the Avermedia LGP apart.
First, it is completely USB powered. On one side is a mini-USB connector that you connect to any powered USB port.
Second, it has a SD card slot, and can record captured footage directly to the SD card itself. Almost all similar external capture devices require sending the footage to another computer via USB. The Avermedia LGP is the only capture solution I’m aware of that will write directly to and SD card or other storage media.
When it initially shipped, the LGP only had the capability of recording 720p video directly to the SD card. If you wanted to record 1080p it was more than capable, but you needed a second computer. A firmware update a few months ago changed that, however, so the device can record 1080p video at up to 30fps directly to the SD card — no second computer needed.
This. Is. Amazing.
I was definitely skeptical at first at just how effective this would be, but in two months I’ve been using it, it has been outstanding.
I bought a 64gb SD card, which had to be formatted to FAT32 using a special utility. Using the highest possible settings the device will support for 1080p recording to SD, an hour of gameplay takes about 7-8 gigabytes. The Avermedia records to TS files and, because the SD card is FAT32, splits the files every 4 gigabytes. I use TS Splitter to join them, and then use Handbrake to convert the resulting files to MP4 for upload to YouTube.
Of the couple hundred hours of gameplay I’ve recorded over that past couple months, the Avermedia has only failed once and it did so in a very obvious way. The Avermedia has a recessed button on the top that you push to start and stop recordings. The button is ringed by an LED light with a very straightforward set of indicators.
Plug the Avermedia in and the light pulses until it is done with its internal configuration and ready to record and which point the light is a solid red. Push the button to start recording and the light will pulse red and on off to indicate everything is being recorded as it should be. If there is are any errors or problems — as there were for me once — the Avermedia will switch to pulsing blue.
So the one time the device had a recording problem (apparently with creating a new file once the initial file reached the 4gb limit), it immediately started flashing the blue indicator and I was able to quickly fix the problem.
Here’s some footage of Saints Row IV captured with the LGP, converted to MP4 and then uploaded to YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlCXNW62LjI