Xbox One's 'Magic Moments' gameplay capture tech detailed

The Xbox One's ability to capture and share gameplay videos will be powered by a special technology designed to identify "magic moments" in a game and automatically record and save them, Microsoft officials tell Polygon.

Gameplay videos can be captured in two basic ways, Ben Kilgore, corporate vice president of Xbox program management told Polygon.

Players can simply say "Xbox capture that" and the console will go back and grab the last chunk of gameplay out of the buffer and save it to your hard drive, he said.

Microsoft also plans to give game developers the ability to have the console record "magic moments" from a game automatically.

"We're going to give game developers access so they can actually go out there and record your magic moment for you because they'll be likely to know when something epic is about to happen in the game," Kilgore said. "Single-player [moments] or it could be something like you just make 10 head shots in a row. Something really cool is happening, and you're on a rampage, I'm going to grab a magic moment for you because I'm smart enough to detect that, you know, you're capturing the flag and and your last 10 yards before you get to the base sort of thing."

The system is constantly buffering video to ensure that you don't miss any of these user-selected or pre-selected "magic moments," Kilgore said.

The console avoids hard drive fragmentation issues by using a "bunch of smart tricks about how we manage RAM and then how it gets buffered onto the hard drive. We're very carefully engineering it so it won't affect any performance or your hard drive."

Those videos will be shareable through Xbox Live and also through video services like YouTube or you will be able to save them to your cloud, he said.