Random: Xbox, Stop Turning My Game Clips Into Complete Darkness

Over the past few months, I've been coming across an increasingly frustrating issue - Xbox is turning my recorded clips into complete darkness. Now, it's not all of them, mind, but it's happening sporadically enough to become a problem.

Take Resident Evil Village, for example. To be honest, I'm not sure what the clip is of, as it's so hard to see and there's only so much I can squint, but I think I was recording a jump scare I embarrassingly screamed at. One of the best elements the Xbox One introduced was the ability to record clips and capture those magical moments in gaming forever. Except now it just looks as though I'm viewing my clips through the world's darkest sunglasses.

This isn't just my issue either, as the internet is flooded with many other Xbox owners suffering the same problem on both Xbox Series X and Series S. From what I can remember, this was never a problem on the Xbox One for me, so again, I'm left even more baffled. Looking around online, there's not a single fix - despite people sharing a bunch of workarounds.

Some have found the issue resolves itself if you disable HDR10 in the settings, but I've had no such luck. In fact, the problem plagued my Halo: The Master Chief Collection clips for a long time, but recently seems to have randomly rectified itself, lending more confusion to the situation - a game which also supports HDR. What's even weirder is that taking screenshots is completely fine, even when I switch HDR on or off. This image from Resident Evil Village was taken the same day as the clip and bares no problems.

Users have been reporting this issue as early as November 2020 on Reddit and other forums. Many have reported that disabling HDR has sorted the issue, while others (including myself) still seem to be plagued with problems. Another error since obtaining the Xbox Series X regarding clips has been that some videos have had out of sync audio. Again, this is an issue I'm yet to find a workaround for, but it's less prevalent than the darkness clips.

Microsoft has said for months it's working on a fix. Originally, it was listed under the known issues for Series X|S page, but it's now nowhere to be found. Similarly, the troubleshooting page doesn't have it listed at all, despite a quick Google search filled with pages upon pages of people suffering the issue. Has it just been left in the dust?

While there's patch work that can be done to seemingly fix the problem, that isn't good enough this many months down the line, and the lack of communication is becoming frustrating. Some gaming moments have been lost forever due to the issue, such as amazing multiplayer kills, or thrilling single player set pieces I've wanted to share with my friends.

So this is an open letter to Xbox - please fix the darkness issue so I can see my clips.

Thank you.

Is this a problem that's affected you? Have you found any workarounds? Drop us a comment and let us know.