How to Sync an External Recorder

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Setting up your External Recorder
• Mass importing old Medal Clips using External Recorder
  • How to set up the External Recorder

We are incredibly excited to introduce a way for you to use Medal with any recorder, not just our own. This means that if you clip with Shadowplay, ReLive or OBS, you can still use Medal’s best-in-class editor and save space by uploading your finished clips directly to Medal.tv to save space on your hard drive.

If you decide to use a different recorder, we recommend turning the recorder in Medal off under Settings > Clips & Recording > Record with Medal.

Setting up your External Recorder

To get started, open your Medal app and go to Settings > PC Storage > Other | Recording. In this section, find the External Recorders Import Locations and click on the Sync an External Recorder button.

On this page, select which external recorder you want to sync with. After selecting your recorders, click Save Changes. Please ensure that the folder is empty before assigning it.

Medal will automatically detect new clips when they are created or added to the selected recorder/folder. If you want to use a custom recorder that we don’t yet support, you can manually browse your computer and select the recorder's video folder.

Once assigned, you can move your clips in batches to make them visible in your clip library.

After setting up your recorders and creating new clips, you should now see the clips in your Medal library without needing to manually import them.

Mass importing old Medal Clips using External Recorder

Medal manages your clip library through a configuration file called clips.json. If this file is missing — such as after a system reset — or if you simply want to bring older Medal clips back into your library, the app won’t automatically recognize your existing video files, even though they’re still stored on your drive.

Since there’s currently no built-in mass import feature in Medal, here’s an alternative method to recover your clips in batches using the External Recorder feature

How to set up the External Recorder

1. Create an empty folder and set it in Medal as your external recorder folder.

2. Move a small group of your old Medal clip files (we recommend ~10 at a time) into this folder.

3. Medal will treat these as newly recorded clips and import them automatically into your library.

This method effectively “tricks” the app into recognizing and ingesting multiple existing clips at once, rather than forcing you to manually add them one by one.

Important! Medal will ignore files whose names include “MedalTV”

To ensure clips are imported properly, you must remove or rename that part of the filename before importing. You can use any bulk renaming tool or a simple script to do this en masse.

After renaming, import via the External Recorder folder, and your clips should appear in your Medal library. By default, the game field of imported clips is set to “Imported,” so search filters (e.g. by game) won’t work automatically. You can:

• Pre-rename files (or prefix them) in a way that indicates the game.

• After import, open each clip and manually set the correct game in the preview modal.

We understand this approach isn't as seamless as restoring your original library file, but it has allowed many users to successfully recover large collections without starting from scratch. Please try it, and let us know if you run into any issues or need help with the renaming step.

If you still need assistance with this, please contact Support.