GoodBit
Required, and it takes a minute
GoodBit records nothing. OBS does.
GoodBit is a companion to OBS. OBS keeps the last thirty seconds of your game in memory and writes them to a file when you press a key. GoodBit watches the folder those files land in: it sorts them by game, measures where the loud part was, and gives you somewhere to trim, tag and share them.
Three things have to be true before a clip appears in your library, and the third is the one nobody finds on their own.
- The replay buffer is running, and a key saves it.
- OBS writes where GoodBit watches, the same folder for both.
- Each clip lands in a folder named after the game. OBS cannot do this. Its filename format takes the clock and the video settings and nothing else, so without help every clip lands in one folder and your whole library looks like a single game.
One button, and a list of what it changes
In the app: Settings → Recording, or the first run, which walks the same ground. There are two routes inside it. Quick setup takes your main screen, thirty seconds, F8, your usual sound and a folder per game, and shows you the four lines it has decided. Step by step asks about each of them.
OBS itself is part of it. With no OBS on the machine, the first step installs it from the OBS project's own release: Windows asks for permission, and nothing else needs clicking, including no auto-configuration wizard afterwards.
Tick what you want it to do. The link at the bottom opens the app with these chosen.
Opens the app and shows you the changes. Nothing is written until you press Apply there.
What it actually writes
A profile folder of its own and a scene collection of its own, both called GoodBit, plus one key in OBS's own config: the flag that stops OBS opening its auto-configuration wizard over the settings this has just chosen. It never edits a profile you made, never switches the profile OBS opens with, and keeps a record of every key it set so it can put things back.
The profile carries the resolution and frame rate of the screen you picked, at full size, and its colour. If that screen is in HDR mode it records in HDR with a ten bit encoder, because recording an HDR display as standard colour clips the highlights in the file itself and nothing afterwards can bring them back. The scene has game capture on top, the screen underneath for anything that is not a fullscreen game, and whichever audio devices you chose, each on its own fader.
It refuses to write anything while OBS is open, and says so. OBS holds its settings in memory and rewrites the whole file when it saves, so an edit made underneath it is thrown away rather than merged.
Install OBS
Free and open source, from obsproject.com.
On Windows you can also run
winget install -e --id OBSProject.OBSStudio.
Open it once after installing. It writes its configuration on first run, and nothing below exists until it has.
One folder, used by both
In OBS: Settings → Output → Recording → Recording Path. In GoodBit: Settings → App → Clips folder. Point them at the same place.
GoodBit reads <that folder>/<Game name>/clip.mp4. The folder
name is the game name, which is what the last step is for.
Turn on the replay buffer
Settings → Output. In Simple mode, tick Enable Replay Buffer and set Maximum Replay Time to about 30 seconds. That is how much of the past OBS keeps in memory, ready to write out.
Then press Start Replay Buffer in the main window, or pass
--startreplaybuffer when launching OBS so it is always on.
Bind a key to Save Replay
Settings → Hotkeys → Save Replay. F8 is a common choice. This is the key you press after something good happens.
It works while the game has focus, which is the whole point, so pick something no game uses.
Capture the game
Add a Game Capture source and leave its mode on Capture any fullscreen application. It then needs no per-game setup and no choice of monitor.
Add a Desktop audio source too, or your clips are silent. If a game refuses to be captured this way, a Display Capture source underneath it is the usual fallback.
A folder per game
This is the part OBS cannot do. Its filename format has 23 tokens and every one of
them is a clock, a resolution or a frame rate; there is no token for the game you are
playing. Typing %GAME silently writes the literal text
GAME into every filename.
GoodBit does it instead, and there is nothing to install. Point OBS at a folder GoodBit watches and it takes over from there: when a clip appears it asks Windows which program was in front while that clip was recording, matches it against the games on your machine, and moves the file into a folder named after it.
-
In OBS: Settings → Output → Recording, and set the
Recording Path to a folder called
.goodbit-incominginside your clips folder. If your clips live inC:\Users\you\Videos, that isC:\Users\you\Videos\.goodbit-incoming. - Create the folder first if OBS will not accept it. The leading dot keeps it out of your library: GoodBit skips it when it scans, so a clip still being written is never indexed half finished.
- That is all. Nothing runs inside OBS, and there is nothing to keep up to date.
A clip recorded while something that is not a game is in front, a browser or a
launcher, is named after that instead, so nothing ever lands loose at the top level.
If GoodBit cannot work out what was in front at all, the clip goes to
Unsorted rather than being left where you will not find it.
Check it works
Start a game, press your key, and alt-tab. A folder named after the game should appear in your clips folder, with one file in it, and GoodBit should already be showing it: it watches that folder whether or not its window is open.
If nothing appears, open Settings → Recording in GoodBit. It reads OBS's own configuration and names the setting that is wrong, in a sentence, rather than leaving you to guess which of the six above it was.