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.
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.
It does exactly what you’re asking. Its like Nvidia Shadow Play or OBS. Constantly records so you can hit a button to save things as they happen.
It works pretty well, but kind of barebones at the moment, a lack of advanced audio and video settings lets it down.
The timeline feature is great though, being able to easily watch back your gameplay in real-time as it records.They need support for multiple audio tracks, other codecs, resolution options, framerate options, different bitrate options. Also recording to memory absolutely needs to be an option so I’m not wearing down my disk by constantly writing to it.
Sure, a few more settings wouldn’t be bad, in example for saving as video file. But I think for the sake of simplicity for the end user and also for the devs themselves (I mean Steam devs) they kept it a bit barebones when it comes to codec or resolution settings. This has to work on Windows and on Linux (not sure about Mac) and on the Steam Deck out of the box.
It’s still beta and they already said in the article some features are coming. I’m more than happy with the timeline feature, this is amazing. I set it to 16 hours at highest quality, lol.
For an initial release yeah, but no real reason for them settings to not exist (in an advanced section if they are too scary for people), people are making their voice heard in the right channels though, so we just gotta hope Valve implement them.
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.
Its another clip-system.
Nvidia and discord already have this built-in but might be an alternative for other gpus?
Its built-in and therefore independent from gpu and driver or additional software, and independent of the operating system, it even works on the Steam Deck out of the box. This is a feature I waited long time for.
I typically don’t keep the nividia or windows gaming stuff turned on. Having it built into steam will be nice, since I use their overlay a lot more. Plus steam deck support is really nice!
It will be nice for Steam Deck and desktop Linux gamers. Discord will never fix their Linux game audio capture, and using OBS for this might be too complex for some people (and has its own issues on Wayland).
BTW I’ve been using the Vesktop Discord mod for the last little while and the audio has generally worked for desktop streaming. Whenever it doesn’t I just fall back to Discord in the browser, which supports audio streaming because Firefox does. (Although of course YMMV.)
People give discord free access to their screens whenever they play a game? This will be much easier to use than nvidia’s (and obs) since it has controller support
Is this beta separate from the Family beta? I guess you can’t do both?
Being in either beta gives you access to this. It’s right there on the webpage.
It wasn’t showing up for me on the families beta I was already on. Switching to the regular beta it now is and the family function looks the same.
Weird, your client probably didn’t update, I am in families beta and it was there.