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Impressions of Plays.tv - A "Let's Play" Version of YouTube

Posted on April 12, 2015

Plays.tv is a program designed to record game footage and provide basic editing capabilities. It's a simple concept, which is one of the main advantages it holds over its competitors – often an amalgamation of ShadowPlay / GVR and Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere.

Right now, the main players in the game capture field are FRAPS, ShadowPlay, and GVR. Anyone who's ever worked with Fraps knows that it can be a pain to work with, especially when the end goal is a simple thirty second clip -- FARPS simply hands you a gigantic, raw video file which you're then left to edit and rescale on your own. ShadowPlay is easy to use for recording, but offers no editing capabilities as of now; it also is exclusive to GeForce GTX series 600 cards or higher (Kepler onward). GVR is made by Raptr, the same company that launched Plays.tv in the first place. We previously benchmarked all three of these utilities against one another in performance.

But what’s the difference between Plays.tv and Raptr’s own GVR? Plays.tv is an all-in-one package -- it runs in the background, detects when you're playing a game, and records until you're finished, at which point it pops-up a window with your footage and provides basic editing tools. If you notice something particularly interesting during your game, you can press a key to separately save the last X seconds of gameplay (20 by default), a feature piggy-backed off of GVR and introduced by ShadowPlay. Once you're done editing, you can choose to upload to Plays.tv (which actually seems like a fairly popular option) or YouTube.

Almost all options can be customized: You aren't forced to record footage during your entire game session; Plays.tv doesn't have to run in the background all the time; video resolution is 480/720/1080p, 15/30/60fps, and 5-50Mb/s bitrate. I recorded at the lowest preset, and I ended up with an entirely passable 480p video that didn't take up an unreasonable amount of space. The storage cap can be adjusted, there's a built-in option to enable a webcam in the corner of the screen, and microphones can be enabled/disabled--those aren't all the options, but they're the important ones.

I encountered very few problems. My friend was unable to use Plays.tv at all despite having an nVidia card slightly less ancient than my Fermi device; I experienced some stuttering and freezing while trying to capture Mercenary Kings, though it's absolutely possible that it wasn't Plays.tv's fault. I got a little frustrated at my inability to permanently delete clips from the client; I don't really want to go fishing around in the recycle bin to delete every forty second clip of me messing around in a game menu. Other than that, though, there wasn't much to complain about, given the simplicity of the interface. I'd definitely recommend giving Plays.tv a try, since it'll only take about a minute to set up.