https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/07/steam-beta-adds-many-more-game-recording-improvements/
For both Steam desktop and Steam Deck, Valve released a fresh Steam Beta update that includes more improvements for the awesome new Game Recording feature.
What I really want from it is just a quick record shortcut that only captures the last minute or 3 like the consoles have. I don't want to have to go back later and save it after marking it.
There is a decky plugin for that, although it adds about 1w of power usage to have it enabled.
That's the feature I'm hoping for. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how the constant record feature works, but I really only want to keep maybe the last 5-10 minutes in temp storage, but it's holding way longer than that for me.
I have a suspicion that was omitted purposefully to prevent people from just sharing their raw saved replays. Since if you have to clip you'll never end up with people sharing full minute videos where the interesting bit was the last five seconds.
This is of course just my own supposition from assuming they had a reason for the omission and thinking about what that reason might be
You can easily enable Beta version in the settings of Steam, if you want to use it now, as it can take a long time until this becomes part of stable version of Steam. I'm just telling you this, in case you did not know. It's not like other Beta software where you have to install a Beta version and is broken anyway or like that. And for the compatibility of the games it does not matter. It works reliable already and I just let it record in the background on my PC and on demand on my Steam Deck.
If you knew this already, then apologies.
Ah yes I knew about it, but I'm sure this will be useful to others! Unfortunately I was having trouble with the beta the other week - it caused my button inputs to not be recognised. Tried several things to fix before giving up and returning to stable - which worked flawlessly again. I don't mind waiting until this feature reaches stable.
I'd really like AV1 support, and a resolution setting. Right now it records my 3440x1440 ultrawide as 1920x804.
Isn't it already using AV1 if the card supports it? The resolution thing is really weird, because I play at regular 1440p, but the recording is in 1080p.
Minimizes CPU usage of video encoding by using the dedicated video encoding hardware of your AMD or nVidia GPUs.
My monitor is ultrawide. It's cropping off the top and bottom, fitting it into the horizontal resolution of 1080p, which is 1920. Vertical hence ends up at 804.
Why would the line about encoding on the GPU suggest AV1 is supported? GPUs can encode using lots of codecs. Are your files AV1?
My card does support AV1, and I use it in OBS, but it also supports H264, HEVC and even older formats. In OBS you choose whatever supported encoding you like.
Steam seems to just use H264 with no option to use something newer.
Yeah, I had a weird Gedanken-choke. You are right, it makes no sense to assume that from this.
Direct link to changelog, as the article itself does not add anything to the changelog itself and just copies it: Steam Client Beta - July 10th
Game Recording
- Improvements to drag and scroll behaviors when finalizing the beginning and end of a clip
- No longer warp the play head to the beginning/end of a clip when setting the beginning/end of a clip via the UI buttons
- Fixed a bug where using the hotkey to add a user marker would drop the marker at the wrong location
- Increase the minimum background recording time to 15 minutes, to give the user time to edit recent clips before the recorded video ages out
- Added a warning to the user if game recording has been turned off to prioritize broadcasting
- Ignore user marker shortcut key if game recording is disabled
- Improved reliability of saving/renaming of .m4s video segment files when antivirus software locks the files temporarily
- Added the ability to save a specific frame of a video as a steam screenshot
- Improved default naming of clip files to improve readability and sortability. Steam will also scan game state descriptions to apply to default clip filename, if available
- Fixed an exception thrown if the user canceled a clip save in the file picker dialog
- Updated message displayed when there is no recent other session where the user can send a clip
Added the ability to save a specific frame of a video as a steam screenshot
I was actually using snipping tool for this as it was missing. Being able to get a screenshot of something after the fact is a nice feature.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Fixed a bug that could leave some local screenshots undeleted after attempting to delete multiple at one time.
Added a warning to the user if game recording has been turned off to prioritize broadcasting.
Ignore user marker shortcut key if game recording is disabled.
Added the ability to save a specific frame of a video as a steam screenshot.
Steam will also scan game state descriptions to apply to default clip filename, if available.
Fixed an exception thrown if the user cancelled a clip save in the file picker dialog.
The original article contains 438 words, the summary contains 90 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I'm pretty sure that works fine actually. I've had issues with it not letting me download windows demos in the past on desktop, but on Steam Deck at least it's let me run every windows demo I've tried.