The Elgato Game Capture HD is a great bit of kit for easily and quickly capturing HD video from your console or any HDMI equipped device. One of it’s great features is the ability to Live Stream to your provider of choice, Twitch in my case, and overlay a live commentary in real time.
Now a live stream without any talk gets a bit dull, especially when there’s a few of you in a group discussing and laughing about what you’re doing. Unfortunately there’s no easy way to capture the Xbox party chat. There’s a few tutorials out there which either have you push the party chat through the game audio on the Xbox whilst recording yourself separately or require you to have a specific headset and an array of different cables and adapters. Neither of these methods work great, the audio quality is often poor and in some cases you’ll find yourself manually mixing in audio tracks trying to line up your own chat recording to the game audio you recorded earlier .
I’ve found a much easier way to pass a Skype chat through to the Game Capture HD software which results in much faster and convenient recording as well as vastly increased voice audio quality. Best of all, there’s no mixing audio tracks manually and it’s just about as lag free as you can get.
The tutorial is based on using a Mac running OSX 10.9, although any recent Mac OS will work and uses only free software. You’ll need a gaming headset for the best results but this method can also be used with s standard headset with mic although you run the risk of game noise from your TV being heard whilst you speak which can ruin a good video.
Check the video below for full instructions on getting started.
I’m looking at doing an advanced follow up video for recording game audio as a separate track allowing you to stream to Twitch with a live commentary but also have local clips with just the pure game audio, keep an eye out on the Youtube Channel for it landing.