Something that bugged me about the Xbox Series X and S is that I could not figure out how to record longer than 1 minute of gameplay.
After much trial and error, I finally discovered how to go past the 1-minute cap placed on the internal storage.
How to Record Up to an Hour of Gameplay on the Xbox Series X|S Time Stamps
- The External Hard Drive I Use (0:00)
- How to Record an Hour of Gameplay on the Xbox Series X and S (1:05)
- Practice Recording with Dead Space 2 and Limitations (2:13)
Let’s take a quick look at how to increase that 1-minute cap to a full hour of gameplay using external storage.
The External Hard Drive I Use
The first thing to note is that I’m using the WD EasyStore 1TB External Hard Drive from Best Buy. (Not affiliated links)
It is a nice, low priced hard drive and 1TB is more than enough for hours upon hours of gameplay clips and images.
Be aware that the Xbox Series X and S requires a USB 3.0 or faster and the hard drive has to be formatted for NTFS.
You can see a great guide by clicking here on how to format an external hard drive to NTFS.
The WD EasyStore comes out of the box ready to work immediately with the Xbox Series X and S.
How to Record an Hour of Gameplay on the Xbox Series X and S
From the Xbox Series X and S dashboard you are going to want to go over to the settings tab.
Then scroll down to preferences and go into the Capture and Share menu option.
Once on the Capture and Share screen, go all the way down to the capture location and change Internal to the external hard drive you have plugged in.
Right after you change it, a confirmation window comes up to confirm that you can now record up to 60 minutes of gameplay.
Simply confirm that and you’re all set up to record longer than a minute.
To boil it down.
- Plugin your external drive into the Xbox Series X and S
- Go into the settings tab
- Go to preferences and then the Capture and Share Menu
- Scroll down to Capture Location and choose your new external drive
- Confirm and everything is good to go
Practice Recording with Dead Space 2 and Limitations
To show that it works, I jump into Dead Space 2 and from the dashboard go into the capture settings.
Then you simply click on start recording and after a few seconds, you can see the recording now shows a full hour of length.
There are few things to note about using an external hard drive on the Xbox Series X and S though.
You cannot share anything recorded to the external hard drive from the Xbox; it can only be shared if it is taken locally.
This means that you have to bring the external hard drive over to a PC or Mac to use the footage or images.
Otherwise, this is how you can extend the 1-minute maximum length into a full hour, I hope this helps you out!
Be sure to check out my unboxing video for the Xbox Series X if you’re interested in learning more!