 When Linus Media Group first started, I wanted to have close-ups of products in our unboxing videos, but we didn't have the resources to spend half a day shooting b-roll of like a case to overlay during a review. Instead, my brilliant idea was to buy a couple of capture cards and use two cameras with a computer as a switcher to go between the two camera angles on the fly. This, I thought, would require two camera operators but would save on editing. Well, that idea sucked and the videos we made that way sucked too, but the reason I told the story wasn't to point out one of the many mistakes I've made as a YouTuber, but rather to explain why I've spent a lot of time shopping for video capture cards over the last couple of years, why I've bought a handful of them, and then why I hate them so very much. The Jazz Mini phone and tablet stand from Cooler Master is now available in a variety of cool colors from these great retailers. Click now to learn more. Mostly my issue is that they just aren't user-friendly. Detecting the format of a video source and adapting it on the fly is technology that we've had in TVs and monitors for decades. So why is it that many video capture cards require you to manually select an input resolution and refresh rate? Something that can be surprisingly tricky to do when cameras are such coy little s*** about how they're actually putting out- outputting. On top of that, Blackmagic's Intensity Pro, actually fairly well regarded card that costs a lot more than this one here today, has suffered from everything from outright refusal to work to the random blue screen issues that we have now on the WAN show across a variety of OSes and platforms that I've tried to get it working correctly on. And that is why I love the Avermedia Live Gamer Portable. Coupled with Avermedia's Rec Central software, it's fast, flexible, and so easy to use that my mother could do it if all she wanted to do was capture her gameplay from the same PC with low latency from a separate PC, game console, or other video device or to an SD card for editing later. Okay Linus, so we're a couple minutes in now and you haven't even talked about the LGP Lite yet. What is your point? My point is that if you just want a super easy to use portable video capture device, this is the one I would buy seven days of the week because it's basically a live gamer portable with a couple fewer features. It's still got the low latency HDMI passthrough that supports up to 1080p, but bear in mind it records at 30 FPS max. It's still got the handy record button on top that tells the software to start capturing. It's still got analog audio passthrough which can be handy sometimes and it still runs off of just a USB port with no additional power needed. But of course this solution costs money compared to free stuff like using your CPU or GPU to do the encoding for you. So then why would you care? Well, CPU encoding is not really ideal at all. It slows down your computer which if you're streaming like, I don't know, battle chests or something on Twitch isn't a huge deal. But if you're doing something demanding and you don't have a crazy CPU, it could legitimately impact your gaming experience. GPU encoding on the other hand is a pretty legit competitor here for game streamers. With ShadowPlay you can record and stream at 60 FPS and up to 2560 by 1440 res. There's very little performance penalty since the graphics card is using a fairly similar type of hardware. It's also a dedicated H.264 encoder. It can record constantly so you can go back and capture moments that have already passed and of course it's absolutely free if you have a supported graphics card. So then Linus, why do we still care about this hardware? The answer is flexibility. With this external H.264 capture device, I can use whatever software I want for streaming and capture whether it's the included app, OBS, Xsplit or whatever. I can capture from any non-HDCP, HDMI equipped device I want. Whether it's a camera, PC, console such as a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One as long as you've got the appropriate firmware update for your PS4 or whatever else. And I don't have to rely on the system to be booted up and GeForce experience to cooperate with me for it to work. In fact, I can even record like changing resolutions and stuff like that and it'll still manage to just sort of, okay, it'll be like, whoa, whoa, no single, okay. And then it'll figure it out and it'll keep going. These things are extremely robust. And aside from all that, I acknowledge that not all the stuff I just said will be applicable to the average consumer. Being able to use it for stuff like recording BIOS settings has saved us time and improved the production values of our videos. And we've done crazy stuff like live broadcasting the entire presentation at Nvidia's GTX 780 Ti launch just by having a live gamer portable hooked up to a Wi-Fi equipped laptop in a backpack and carrying a camera plugged in via HDMI around the venue. It's just a really, really cool piece of hardware and this one is just like it, just without the SD slot as well as the analog input. And it's cheaper. So conclusion time. The reason I agreed to do this review, even though it's basically just a slightly trimmed down version of a product that I've already talked about before at a lower price, is because I feel like I didn't do the original live gamer portable justice last time. And now that I've been using it for so long, I feel like I needed to do something to get across what a great device I think it is. And whether you go with the deluxe live gamer portable version or the bare bones LGP Lite one for your video capture needs, be they gaming related or something else entirely, I know that you guys will be as happy as I am because unlike so many of the other solutions I've tried, it actually just works. Which is all I ask for. Thank you for watching guys. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment letting me know what's your preferred streaming method if you do any game streaming capture or whatever else. And as always, check out the video description where you can find our support link, you can give us monthly contribution, you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, or you can just change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so that we can get a small kickback whenever you buy cereal or something. I've never actually bought food online before. Fascinating. Anyway, as always guys, don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already.