Here's one of the first videos I captured, wandering through Guild Wars 2. I wish I could show you the raw footage, but you wouldn't all fit in my living room.

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The Live Gamer HD features a built-in H.264 video encoder, creating high-quality video on-the-fly while keeping the sucking of system resources to a bare minimum, two things the software solutions I've used in the past do not do. Hitting the record hotkey for FRAPS is an instant resource hit and frame rate drop, and the video is huge—we're talking in the gigabytes for a couple of minutes. The Live Gamer HD on default settings outputs video that's not much more that 100MB a minute, if that.

The end product is gorgeous, even more so if you don't mind dropping down to 720p, where the Live Gamer HD starts recording at 60 frames-per-second. Even though YouTube won't do 60 FPS the difference is noticeable.

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Nestled inside the RECentral software is the ability to stream footage directly from the Live Gamer HD as well. All it took was an account at Twitch.TV. The software logged me in and started the show with a single button press. I'd always imagined it was more complicated than that. Now I feel silly.

All-in-all my time with the Live Gamer HD was largely enjoyable and mildly eye-opening. I did have to juggle video cards about—my current system only has two PCI-E slots and I was dual-wielding NVIDIA GTX 660 TIs—and since this is a pass-through solution there's no option to hide the mouse cursor, which seems to tick off some people. Otherwise an overall positive experience.

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I was looking for a simple solution to HD video capture, and I found it in the AverMedia Live Gamer HD. Long may its glowing red button save me from accidentally broadcasting marital relations to the gaming public.

The AverMedia Live Gamer HD is available at Amazon for $199.99.