Ever do something amazing in a game and wish you could share the clip with the world (or at least Facebook)? Well, thanks to a plethora of built-in tools and software designed to record gameplay, it's easier than ever before. Read on for Kotaku's (mostly) definitive guide to capturing gameplay video on your consoles, PC, or even a Mac!

We often get asked how to capture and share clips either for YouTube or for our Highlight Reel feature. During the last console generation, players had to use external devices to capture gameplay video. Now the latest round of consoles (well, two of them) have built-in video capture and streaming functions, but even those can cause some hassles if you want to upload your video to YouTube instead of OneDrive or Facebook.

Since I'll be covering a variety of products and applications, this post will focus on the basics of each. I'll get more detailed with the consoles since those will be the most commonly used. Let's get started!

Whether you're shopping for a video capture device, trying to get video from one program to work with another, or any number of other situations, these terms might come up. This is just a super-basic explanation for each in case you get lost during this article.

To capture video from a console through a third-party device, you'll have to turn off your console's HDCP setting (thanks, Hollywood). Theoretically, your video apps like Netflix might not work while HDCP is turned off, but I've been able to use Netflix with HDCP off, so...

_()_/

When capturing video, you want to keep in mind what your goal is going to be. If you just want to share unexpected moments, you need some kind of buffer recording feature, otherwise you'll have dozens of hours of video to go through every time you want to find a 30-second clip. However, if you want to make fragvideos of all your countless headshots, you don't want to stop playing to click record every minute or two, so you need to be recording constantly. That means you need to be aware of how much each hour of video is taking up, and have enough hard drive space to store it all.

When using a video capture device to capture console footage, the device needs to be powered to pass the video through to your TV. If you don't want to constantly have to switch cables around or have your computer on, you can use an HDMI splitter between your console and the capture device to avoid that problem. This will split the HDMI signal so that one can go directly to your TV and the other to your capture device. It's a handy setup that will help you avoid some minor nuisances while playing. I'd suggest it to anyone who has some extra cash for a splitter.

The focus of this guide is on capturing short clips and getting them onto the internet to be seen by others. That is also the first step toward getting all the footage for bigger, more complicated projects, but that's a topic for a separate article. While this post won't explain exactly how to use every device or program, that should be easy enough to figure out. The goal here is to help point you in the right direction for whatever you might be trying to do, and to hopefully help you avoid some common mistakes.

Here is the original post:

How To Capture Video Game Footage On PS4, Xbox One, PC And Mac