hello i am wanderer001 and this is my review of the avermedia live gamer mini gc311 now i will
admit i was a little naive when it came to gaming capture cards i honestly thought that there was
something that lived inside the computer that you were streaming off of little did i know that there
were portable versions of gaming capture cards so this one from avermedia i will disclose i did not
purchase on my own but it also was not sent to me by avermedia my wife entered a contest that
a twitch streamer was holding bog otter awesome twitch streamer you should check him out link in
the description below to his youtube page and if you like what you see there you can go follow him
on twitch but she won a contest and what she won was the live stream duo pack by avermedia
one of the components in that pack was this streaming card so i get to test it out and
have set her up for streaming in fact she has already done a test streaming run one of the
particular things about this capture card is that it will allow you to capture full 1080 60 frames
a second yes i know there are 4k options out there but look at it it's small it's light if you don't
believe me how small it is here's a deck of cards here is the capture card on the deck of cards it
is ridiculously small and lightweight so on the front flat matte plastic finish this is a light
bar indicator just to let you know what is going on with the device for example if it's solid blue
it's ready if it's flashing red it's recording if it's slow flashing blue it's streaming
fast flashing red disk is almost full flashing blue installing drivers red disk is full so this
is going to be paired with your computer no light means it's error device abnormality or in this
case the device is not plugged in coming around to the bottom you have four little rubberized feet
pad to help it stay in place and then here is the important part your hdmi out your hdmi in and your
usb 2.0 not 3.0 port and this is how you're going to power the device there's also a little recess
reset button right there this is a standalone capture card however you do use your computer
as an intermediary for running this particular thing it is plug and play you can plug it right
into your computer and drivers are downloaded to your computer however there also is software that
you can download to update the drivers on your computer and make this talk a little better now
the power usage back here is provided via the the included five foot braided cable i'm not a super
fan of braided cables and i think that they are over hyped but it is included what is not included
are hdmi cables so you will have to either have extra ones lying around or plan ahead like i did
and purchase some extras one of the issues that i have found with this particular capture card
is because it's so lightweight if you have heavier cableage you're actually not going to be sitting
flat on the surface they'll be cocked i mean it's a m it's a minor consideration now because this is
part of the streamer duo pack the other portion of what comes just for the capture card is this
and normally i don't show this but i just want you to realize for somebody who has
no experience whatsoever you get the device the cable and then a quick start guide which
pretty much has here's what's in the box here's what's on the back this is your light indicator
there you go how to plug it in and that's it in different languages so if this is your first time
with a capture card you may want to do a little more research ahead of time for troubleshooting
now a lot of you may be looking at this as a means of capturing video from your playstation so that
you can either stream or post to youtube however i being a youtube creator found another purpose
that i can use this for and that is for actually capturing the screen when i'm reviewing set-top
boxes like roku or nvidia shield and what i'm going to do is i'm going to actually show you the
difference between my old setup which was pretty much pointing my camera at the tv set versus what
i got using the avermedia capture card here to give you an example of why even if you're not a
game streamer something like this could actually be extraordinarily valuable to you so here we
go a comparison of before and after of using a capture card and not using a capture clip apps
select this and then it will show us all of our apps and then we can get more from the from the
places these are things that we're in progress you'll also notice that the color shifted a
little bit when i came from up top to my play next area but this will just be the next up thing so
you kind of get an idea of things that have been watching you'll see what channel they were on so
these were on twitch this was on sling all the way at the end there that was pluto so that's
this so if i came up to something and hypothetically here we go next item down
is peacock picks so if i select this i can add to my watch list i can see all of the episodes
so hopefully that comparison was helpful from a creator standpoint obviously the capture card
while it's going to do all the heavy lifting itself you still do need to have software that
will allow the capture card to record and do what it does now the beauty of avermedia here is it's
very agnostic as to what it can be used with you can use it with streamlabs obs you can use it with
obs classic and xsplit avermedia also has their own recording software which i will admit is very
intuitive for the first time streamer or video recorder because i will admit obs is a bit of a
handful to set up if you're a novice so let's take a look at the software that you can use to record
using your avermedia capture card we're looking at here is the avermedia rec central 4 recording
software so this is one of the good things that you get out of the box with your capture card or
the streaming duo is you have access to this record software now i will say i have mixed
feelings about the software only in that one while the software is really simple and easy to set up
if you look down here in the lower right hand corner it is taxing my computer and while my
computer is a little older i did build it to be future proof so what do i mean by future proof
well in the case of this particular laptop i have a core i7 6 68 20 hk cpu and i have 64 gigabytes
of ram and an nvidia geforce gtx 980 m and here you can see in the lower right hand corner
i'm using up 40 of my cpu just for this program and 33 gigabytes of ram this is not including
the obs software that i'm running right now to record this particular setup now i will say
just having this on and i'm not streaming anything or recording anything this is using nineteen
thousand six hundred megabytes and fourteen almost 15 percent of my cpu in a similar setup using obs
and actually recording i use 800 megabits worth of memory and much less cpu so just know
that if you're using an older older system you may run into problems
actually streaming now in the background here you've just been watching my roku background as
it's cycling but let's take a look at what we can actually do with the software should you have a
computer that actually can support uh running it so what we're looking at here is the main
capture area you have single capture you have multi multi will be multi will allow you to
add layers so a camera right now i'm on single because i just need this to capture what's on
my tv set or in your case the playstation or xbox whatever you're trying to capture off of your tv
here we're indicating the live gamer mini we can always come over here and edit
anything so here we go quick little options we're not going to mess with that too much over
here on the right you have record stream and then multistream you have different recording profiles
that you can set up right now i'm on optimal and it's doing 1920x1080 at 59.9 frames a second
here you can actually see the available space that you have on your hard drive so
if you have multiple hard drives like i do you can indicate to the hard drive that actually has the
most space for saving here you can see there is a microphone mute button and you can see you can
mess with your levels right there as well as audio that you're getting you also have your
mute device preview you've got your audio mixer here so opening this up will let you really dig in
and change settings as you like and right here you have full screen mode the beauty of this
program is that it's really start setup there's even a wizard that you walk through right here
if you ever need to reset up the wizard you click on that and you can set it up streaming recording
and it walks you through most of the settings now one of the other things i like is this help button
it actually has a visual overlay as to what the individual components mean so if this is the first
time you're messing with any type of streaming software this would be really good to kind of
help you get started you can enable always on top mode or you can have a minimized mode
we've been operating in the maximum mode so that we could see all of our options over here coming
to the wheel we just click on settings and it will bring us into our settings you have options for
general shortcuts if you want i will admit uh i did not use shortcuts in obs until much later
in my usage of obs i highly recommend setting up shortcuts it'll save you a lot of time especially
if you're using a single monitor setup and you're trying to play a game profile management you can
export or import your profiles and then you have about one of the interesting things is
you have a media share option so if you wish to share media and here you go this is media
that i have just kind of sitting there from tests but you can share that right through the system
and then we're going to hit our record button this middle button if you select it will actually bring
you to the avermedia website for more information now this is a separate download and it did not
come pre-installed with the drivers for the capture card but just know if you're starting
out and you don't want to necessarily try to set up obs studio on your own or look through a guide
this is a very simple straightforward quick setup for streaming setup for recording software
again your computer will have to be a little beefier in order to handle it
so when you're ready all you would do is you come here click record or that would be stream if you
were on the streaming option you can select for snapshots if you so chose and then you would watch
your countdown timer here as you record and lose writable space but don't worry if you
pay attention to your capture card and don't see your numbers here once it starts blinking
red you'll know that you're getting kind of close to a full hard drive and you should stop streaming
so again really simple to use straightforward streaming software that can be used with your
avermedia capture card so as long as you have a computer that can support
using avermedia's software you've got a fairly simplistic means of capturing gameplay or set-top
boxes however again it is compatible with other types of software so if you don't want to use
avermedias you don't have to that's the beauty of this capture card and intermediate in general
don't think that i'm going to leave you with just software and video recording from a set-top box
obviously if you're looking at this you're probably thinking about streaming
on twitch or one of the other many game streaming platforms so let me show you some
actual gameplay footage using this capture card again in full 1080 60 frames a second
no mercy
your time is over
this life
the end
i dedicate this to the wind
how did my dancer
up
is
now i'm sure there are those out there that might be able to find fault with the way that that looks
however i want you to keep in mind that the live gamer mini here is made for people who are just
starting out and don't necessarily have a lot of money to spend on more robust game capture systems
so that leads us to the question of how much does the avermedia live gamer mini cost well
separately this costs 130 dollars keep in mind something like the elgato system which again if
you go to their lower end 1080 60 frames a second capture card will run you somewhere around 200 so
for those that are just starting out trying to get into either live streaming or even youtubing
something like this at 130 is not terrible for a full 1080 60 frames a second i will admit
i'm being very vague on the technical specs of this particular capture card mainly because i
want to use this review as a means of telling you my experiences without bogging you down
with all the technical jargon especially if you might just be starting your adventures
into looking into using a capture card what i can say from my experiences both using it for youtube
and my wife's trying out a test stream with it is it is a very capable capture card and
is well worth looking into especially if you're just starting out so thanks again to bog otter
for the contest win for my wife again links in the description area below if you're interested
in checking him out as well as if you're looking for this particular capture card i will have a
link in the description where you can pick it up on amazon with that being said i highly recommend
the avermedia live gamer mini gc 311 i have been wanderer001 if you have any questions
or comments please feel free to leave them in the area below and as always thanks for watching