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Dang this is pretty huge actually! Steam Deck has this capability through a plug-in, I imagine now it may be able to get further community development now that there’s an official method. And Steam Deck aside, this should be a pretty significant benefit to low-spec gamers or anyone who just wants less software to work with.
Its huge for me, because in Linux I can only record through OBS. And OBS is suboptimal, compared to a builtin solution like this. On Steam Deck I used the plugin too, but had to remove it again, because the plugin system stopped working.
Why do you find OBS to be suboptimal? I never used OBS on Linux, is it not working well there?
- I have to run OBS separately, before gaming or when I ant to record something while I am playing already.
- Configuration of the settings. While I found good settings, its still complicated for most people. Especially on Wayland (a Linux thing).
- When I want to capture a game, I have to specifically run the game and select in OBS to capture this window. Or capture entire screen.
- I still can’t use AV1 for recording, but I think that I managed to set VAAPI recording set to my GPU? I am not 100% sure.
- The flexibility of recording and organization in the way Steam does it is way superior to any external software and custom configuration of it. With OBS I have to rename files and organize things manually, while these are done automatically for each game in Steam.
- Besides Steam has background recording too, not just on demand manual recording on button press. Think of Nividias Shadowplay. With OBS I have to start end end recording manually.
- While we play we can add specific markers to the timeline with hotkeys. OBS doesn’t have that.
OBS is clunky and complicated to me. The Canvas and Output resolutions are separate, which confuses me the hell out of it. I only experimented with some settings so far to record gameplay (after my new PC installation) and need to see how this works out. But if I change settings to record something different, then I have to configure it again to record gameplay. Also to use Hotkeys, I have to allow hotkeys to be used globally in my system (which I don’t want to otherwise). Because of Wayland and how it works.
All in all its must simpler and superior to do this in Steam itself now. For other use cases, I will still keep OBS, its not bad, just not straightforward for daily game recordings. But I can add other software and games to Steam and can use it with Steam Recording too (if the overlay works there).
Fair enough. It’s nice to have something that just works out of the box and doesn’t need much configuration, for sure.
And even though most points you have mentioned are actually doable in OBS, they need additional setup/configuration or a plugin. But I personally don’t mind that, and in most cases I prefer that, especially granular configuration of video settings.
Is this beta separate from the Family beta? I guess you can’t do both?
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Can’t you just use gnome-screenshot with the screencast feature? Unless this lets you record stuff that already happened, a sort of ‘capture last 30s’ sort of thing.
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As others noted, this has background recording functionality and manual on demand recording as well. I have used manual recording software and still have OBS installed for any use case. But having Steam Recording builtin is very convenient.
- configuration, its much easier to setup than any other solution if you care to get best quality and performance
- convenience, integrated makes it easy to setup and use, with additional features, plus its such a fiddling to record specific windows when using external software such as OBS or similar if I don’t want to record entire screen in windowed or fullscreen mode, especially on Wayland
- performance, Steam records the raw game footage from your video card and therefore has the best possible quality and performance one can get out of video recording
- no overlays, Steam will only capture the game footage without fps indicator or other stats and without overlays or menus from Steam, other software would just record everything visible
- timeline, resulting video is raw footage and is not encoded into a video file format for output and not useable before output to video (mp4), we can add timestamps with hotkeys while playing to mark specific points in recording, then we can mark start and end points or select certain parts in the timeline to save or export it
- share, it has multiple sharing functionality besides saving to mp4 video file format
All of this is builtin and works the exact same way regardless of operating system and hardware (independent from cpu and gpu and os). No one needs to study hardware and software in order to configure it in the best possible way. If you used this on Windows, its the same on Linux, no dependency of recording software.
This is a much bigger deal than just recording footage with gnome-screenshot.
