Recording
Recording captures video of a game with a button combo, saved straight to the SD card. When you leave the game, Leaf converts the clip to an MP4 that plays anywhere - Discord, a browser, your phone - and splits it into pieces small enough to post if it is long.
To get clips off the handheld, use Central Scrutinizer to download them over Wi-Fi to a computer or phone, then post them to Discord, Reddit, or wherever you like.
Turning it on
Section titled “Turning it on”Recording is off by default. Turn it on in Settings → Controls & Feedback, on the Recording row. Two more rows sit underneath it and stay grayed out until recording is on.
Recording a game
Section titled “Recording a game”Hold MENU and tap R1 to start, and the same combo again to stop.
Neither button reaches the game, so you can record from a title screen or a menu without pressing anything in the game itself.
A small red dot appears in the top left corner while a recording is running, and pulses slowly so you can tell it apart from anything in the game. It disappears the moment you stop.
The dot is not in your clips. Recording captures the game’s own picture before anything is drawn over it, which is the same reason a shader never shows up in a recording, so the dot stays on your screen and out of the video.
Where clips go
Section titled “Where clips go”Everything lands in a Recordings folder at the top level of the SD card.
Filenames include the game name and the date and time.
You will see two files for each clip. The .mkv is the original capture, and
the .mp4 is the shareable version made when you left the game. Converting
happens in the background, so the launcher comes straight back and the MP4 appears
a few seconds later - longer clips take longer.
Splitting long clips
Section titled “Splitting long clips”Discord’s free upload limit is 10 MB, which is about 30 seconds of gameplay at Leaf’s recording quality. Anything longer would be too big to post.
Split Over 10MB is on by default. When a clip is too large, it is saved as numbered parts instead of one file, each small enough to upload. Short clips are untouched and stay a single MP4.
Turn it off if you would rather always have one file and handle the size yourself.
Keeping the original
Section titled “Keeping the original”Keep Original is on by default, which is why each clip leaves both an .mkv and
an .mp4 behind. The .mkv holds lossless audio and is the file the MP4 is made
from.
Turn it off if you only want the shareable MP4 and would rather save the space. The original is deleted only after the MP4 has been written successfully, so a failed conversion never costs you the clip.
What gets recorded
Section titled “What gets recorded”Two things are worth knowing before you record something you care about.
Recording only works in RetroArch games. Most systems run through RetroArch and record normally. PSP, Dreamcast, and PortMaster games run in their own emulators, which Leaf cannot record - the combo simply does nothing there.
Clips do not include shaders. Recording captures the picture the emulator draws, before any shader runs, so a clip of a game with a CRT shader will not have the scanlines you were looking at. The recording is a clean, sharp version of the same image.