How I turned OBS into a ShadowPlay replacement

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If you have an Nvidia graphics card, you've probably heard of ShadowPlay. It's a feature you can enable so that when you press a keyboard shortcut, the last X minutes are saved to a folder on your PC. It constantly records using a hardware encoder to put limited strain on your GPU, and that's something you can't really get on any other hardware. AMD's equivalent is ReLive, but it pales in comparison to ShadowPlay and its power. However, with OBS, you can create your own ShadowPlay that works on any computer… and yes, it even works on Mac.



How to create your own ShadowPlay replacement with OBS

You must enable a replay buffer

OBS has a feature called “Replay Buffer” that you can enable. It does the same thing as ShadowPlay and ReLive, except instead of actively writing temporary recordings to disk, it stores them in your system memory. You'll need to make sure you have enough RAM, but the feature is fully configurable and will tell you how much RAM it needs. On my Mac, recording a two-minute replay buffer at 20Mbps only requires about 288MB of RAM.


If you want to set up and configure this feature, it's very easy.

  1. In OBS, go to Settings
  2. Click output
  3. Change Output mode To Progressive
  4. Click Enable playback buffer
  5. Change the playback time as desired. I set it to two minutes.
  6. Go to Streaming and set the bitrate as desired. Mine is set to 20,000 Kbps.
  7. Choose your Video encoder. For Nvidia this should be NVENC, for AMD this should be AMD HW.
  8. Go to Recording and make sure that the video encoder Use stream encoder

Done! You have now set up OBS with a buffer for continuous replays. You can change where these are saved in the OBS settings, and you can set up instant replays to use a different naming scheme than your other recordings if you want. You will need to Start playback buffer on the OBS default page, and you can stop it whenever you don't need the playback buffer.


Next, you need to set a keyboard shortcut to save clips when you need them. Settingsgo to Keyboard shortcuts. Scroll down and select Save repetitionand press a key combination you're familiar with. You won't get any visual feedback when a replay is saved, so you might want to make it easy to save it. That way you know you didn't accidentally miss it.

The best part about using OBS for this is that you don't have to worry about any processing power failures on your hardware either. It's the same native encoder you get on AMD and Nvidia GPUs as long as you configure it to use it.

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