Uploaded January 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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I'm thinking of uploading gameplays again inbetween my regular videos, and currently looking into cheap but viable methods to record gameplays from my Switch. This method here is a no-brainer, but I wanted to see how good a quality I can achieve from the Switch's already sadly low bitrate recording output.

I chose to do a Salmon Run for this because it's less costly than say, needing to hit the capture button right in the middle of a turf war firefight. :u

What you see in this upload is completely unedited, as in I never threw it into Sony Vegas like I normally would with almost all of my other videos. Details of what exactly I did are down below~

Anyways I hope the upload looks okay. But maybe you guys can recommend me less shitty but still cheap alternatives? Let me know in the comments. c:

(TL;DR - I don't want to spend on an expensive capture device atm and I'm experimenting with inexpensive ways of recording)

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The builtin recorder (or perhaps Shadowplay, because that's pretty much what it is anyway because lol nvidia tegra chip) continuously saves a buffer of up to the last 30 seconds of your gameplay. Every time you hold down the capture button and save it to a video, the buffer resets, and begins recording again at almost exactly the point where the last buffer stopped.

So with that information, I devised a method. I downloaded an interval timer app to my phone, and set it to beep every 25 seconds, so everytime it beeps, I'll have a 5-second window to hit that capture button before the 30-second buffer window ends. Because really, if I'm going to hit it at exactly the 30-second mark, my mind will just be constantly racing between focusing on my gameplay & not forgetting to hit the button, which is distracting as hell, and actually costed me a match lmao. Though even with that 5-sec window, it's still a bit distracting because your thumb still has to let go of the left stick and reach for the button.

But after all that trouble's over, I moved all the clips to my PC and used MP4Joiner to losslessly combine the footages into one, then I threw that output into Avidemux to clean up the low-bitrate artifacts and re-encoded it, before finally uploading it.

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