AVerMedia continues to impress us with its flexible game capture devices that don't require a PC.
The company unveiled the Live Gamer Portable in 2013, which let users record footage their game consoles directly to an SD card, without a connected PC.
The AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus sports a more compact and functional design, and the ability to pass 4K video through to your TV.
It can't record 4K and lacks the low-latency feed that makes gaming directly from your capture window possible, but its 1080p60 footage looks smooth, and streaming when connected to a PC is painless.
At $149.99, it's a flexible, functional capture device that on-the-go Let's Players, streamers, and other gamers will appreciate, and earns our Editors' Choice for game capture devices.
Design
The Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus is a 5.8-inch-long red-and-black block with a triangular cross section.
The front panel is dominated by a large button with an aperture-shaped indicator light in the middle.
The light turns blue when it's ready to stream or record, and pulses red when recording and blue when streaming.
If something is wrong with a connection, power supply, storage, or any other setting, the light will flash.
The button serves different purposes depending on what mode the LGP2+ is in.
When connected to a PC with RECentral software installed, pressing the button will launch the software, then either record footage to the PC or stream it using the default streaming profile.
With a microSD card installed and in PC-Free mode, the button will start and stop recording to the card.
A three-way sliding switch, a volume rocker, and two 3.5mm audio ports sit on the front edge of the LGP2+.
The switch puts the capture device in PC, PC-Free, or USB Storage mode.
PC and PC-Free enable video capture with or without a connected computer, and USB Storage mode lets the LGP2+ function as a microSD card reader when plugged into a PC.
The 3.5mm audio ports serve as an input from your controller and output from your headset.
This lets you capture headset-based voice commentary or party chat, even when party chat is transmitted through the headset rather than the HDMI connection to the TV.
The back of the LGP2+ holds an HDMI input for the game console or other video device you want to capture, an HDMI output for running to your TV, a micro USB port for connecting to a PC or USB power supply, and a microSD card slot.
The LGP2+ supports Class 10 and above microSD cards, up to and including SDXC capacities like 128GB.
Just make sure they're both fast enough and formatted correctly, as explained later in the review.
You don't need a microSD card to capture video if the device is connected to a PC.
No analog video options are available, so you can't capture footage from legacy game systems without an analog-to-HDMI upscaler.
4K Pass-Through
The Plus part of Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus is 4K pass-through support.
The device can only capture up to 1080p video at 60fps, but it can let a 4K video signal pass through from the source to the TV.
This is useful if you have a PS4 Pro or Xbox One X and want to enjoy the 4K gaming experience on your end even if you don't have the storage space, bandwidth, or editing power to work with 4K footage.
It doesn't support high dynamic range (HDR), however, so you still will lose some of the benefit to having either system for certain games even if you have an HDR-capable 4K TV.
Apart from the 4K pass-through, the LGP2+ is effectively identical to the AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable 2 it replaces.
The HDMI pass-through causes no perceptible lag to the connected TV.
Running our input lag tester through the LGP2+ to an LG OLED55E8PUA, the lag we measured ticked up by only a few hundredths of a millisecond, from 21.1ms to 21.4ms in the Game picture mode.
Pass-through is different from capture latency, though.
The captured video footage on our Razer Blade Pro test laptop had noticeable lag when compared with the TV.
Don't try to play games directly from your capture software's preview window; the lag is too high to be comfortable.
If you want lag-free capture, AVerMedia's Live Gamer Extreme 2 (the 4K pass-through-capable version of the Live Gamer Extreme) and ExtremeCap U3 devices enable low-lag gameplay from your connected PC.
PC Mode
PC Mode lets the LGP2+ work as a USB capture device with any compatible computer.
Use the included cable (or any USB 3.0 USB-to-micro-USB cable) to connect the device to a USB 3.0 port on your PC.
Once it's connected, you can use it to capture footage to any software that can work with a video capture device.
If you don't already have a preferred recording/streaming program like XSplit or Open Broadcasting Software (OBS), you can use AVerMedia's own free RECentral software.
It's simpler and less powerful than commercial recording and streaming software, but it can still capture quality footage and either save it to your PC or stream it to all major streaming services.
RECentral supports Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and any other streaming platform that uses RTMP.
Even if you don't want to use RECentral as your primary recording or streaming software, it's important for configuring the LGP2+.
It lets you easily update the device's firmware, choose between three video quality levels and adjust different color and audio settings when recording in PC-Free mode, and toggles HDCP detection (a necessary option to disable for certain video source devices, like iPads).
For simple game recording and streaming, the Single mode in RECentral is enough.
It pulls in the video the LGP2+ captures, adding any narration you want to contribute with a headset connected to the device or your PC.
You can also set up more complicated scenes in the software's Multi mode.
This enables the streaming and recording of multiple video feeds at once, including the footage captured by the LGP2+.
The most basic use is combining the LGP2+ stream with the feed from your webcam to offer facecam reactions to whatever you're playing, but you can get a bit more creative.
You can also use Multi mode to set up several scene presets using different video sources and various overlays and effects.
You can move your facecam to different corners of the screen by assigning scenes for each position, or switch between close-up looks when you want to speak to the camera with the game in the background.
You can overlay text and graphics on your stream, or put up video files or multimedia web elements.
You can also capture or stream part or all of your PC's screen in this mode.
Each element of your scene can be configured with a different position, scale, and transparency, and you can even rotate and flip sources on the stream.
Chroma key is also supported, so you can set up a green screen (or any other color background, as long as it's consistent) for special effects.
RECentral is very powerful for free, introductory streaming software.
However, it doesn't have as many granular settings as OBS or XSplit, or their interface customization options, or their support for third-party plug-ins.
It's very good for first-party recording/streaming software, but professional video producers and streamers will likely look toward the more complex and modular applications.
Fortunately, the LGP2+ works just as well with those programs as it does with RECentral.
PC-Free Mode
PC-Free mode lets you start recording with a touch of the button, without a connected PC.
As long as the LGP2+ is getting enough power over USB, the status light on the button should glow a steady blue when ready to record.
Pressing the button will turn the light red and make it fade slowly in and out, which indicates that it's recording.
If it starts flashing rapidly or shows different colors, check your card, and make sure the mode switch is set to PC-Free.
If you run into problems using the PC-Free recording mode, it's probably one of two issues: a slow microSD card or the wrong card format.
You'll need a Class 10 or higher microSD card, which is effectively the floor of card speeds at this point.
I picked up a faster generic 64GB U1 card from Micro Center for around $18.
Just look at the card itself and see if it says Class 10 or U1 or U3.
It also needs to be formatted in FAT32, which can be an issue if you want to wipe a large card on a Windows 10 PC.
Windows 10 formats cards to exFAT by default, which the LGP2+ can't use.
Fortunately, AVerMedia provides a link to a FAT32 disc formatting program on its support site.
You might also run into HDCP copy protection errors with the PS4 or Xbox One.
The PS4 requires manually disabling HDCP if you want to capture footage with any device.
The Xbox One isn't supposed to copy protect game footage, but I ran into some hiccups on testing that required a full reset of the system to enable recording in PC-Free mode.
Footage captured at 1080p60 in high-quality mode takes up approximately 130MB per minute, regardless of whether the LGP2+ records it with a PC or without.
That's the highest quality video it can capture, and you can crank the quality or frame rate down if you want to work with smaller file sizes.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_YBt1bwoJI[/embed]
Performance
The above video shows footage recorded by the LCP2+ in both PC and PC-Free modes.
The Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition footage was captured from a Nintendo Switch in PC-Free mode, and the Assassin's Creed: Origin gameplay was captured from an Xbox One X in PC mode.
While recording the Assassin's Creed footage, 4K video passed through to our test TV even while 1080p60 video was being recorded.
HDR effects were lost, but the original system resolution was preserved.
The Hyrule Warriors footage suffers from some minor compression artifacts, especially around text.
The downconverted 4K footage of Assassin's Creed: Origins looks much sharper recorded at the same 1080p60, with no noticeable artifacts.
This appears to be the result of the Hyrule Warriors' native 1080p resolution in docked mode and its extremely variable frame rate; the game adjusts the frame rate heavily to push the action to 60fps when possible, and the capture device struggles to keep up with the fluctuating video.
This is a very common effect when uploading video with variable frame rates to YouTube and other online services; transcoding the footage produces artifacts.
The effect is particularly heavy in Hyrule Warriors, and should be much less noticeable on games with more stable frame rates, whether they're natively 1080p or 4K.
I also set up a test stream of Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition on Twitch, through RECentral.
The stream worked with no issues, showing crisp, smooth video in the browser with an expected lag of several seconds from game to stream (a normal amount of lag for a Twitch stream).
In all cases, the button on the LGP2+ toggled recording or streaming on and off reliably.
Conclusions
The AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus is a very handy capture device for Let's Players, Twitch streamers, and anyone else who wants to record the games they play.
The PC-Free mode and support for high-capacity microSD cards means you can capture footage on the go without a PC, and its capabilities as a PC-tethered capture device are reliable and robust.
The pass-through works flawlessly, though it shows enough lag in the preview of PC capturing that you need to have a separate TV or monitor to comfortably play, regardless of how you want to capture the video.
If you want to cut down that lag, you need to get a faster capture device that lacks standalone recording, like the more expensive AVerMedia Live Gamer Extreme 2 or the Elgato Game Capture HD60 S.
And if you want to record 4K footage natively, you need a much pricier internal capture card, like the Elgato Game Capture 4K60 Pro.
For most users, though, the LGP2+ is an excellent capture device that records and streams high-quality 1080p footage, with flexibility that earns our Editors' Choice.
