I knew it wasn't because that would be WAY to expensive to store everyone's footage as some kind of weird spy videos. Also, no one wants to buy your god awful gameplay of Elden Ring of whatever, it has no value, but crazy high costs. People always forget that the data has to be valuable enough to store in the first place, Steam already knows every game you play, that's all they need to sell you games.
I remember the good old days when we recorded with fraps and bandicam, and your fps dropped by like 30-40%. I dont even realize how blessed we are that now with shadowplay and modern GPU's we barely notice a framerate drop
Not only shadow play, we generally get by far less frame drops when recording compared to 15 years ago. But damn, fraps and bandicam do unlock memories - I still regret buying bandicam as it constantly somehow misarranged the audio file with the support no longer even replying after I send in a requested demo recording - shadowplay and obs both had been a huge game changer by not only providing proper free recording tools but also more stable ones in most aspects (and thanks to being free generally better support due to all the people using it which led to troubleshooting being a breeze).
technically you could also buy a device and plug it inbetween your monitor and gpu so copy the video signals to a second storage without any frame drops
One thing I do miss about FRAPS tho... unlimited fps recording. Modern recording software caps the fps to 60. Fraps had no limit. You can record raw 144fps video, and it was glorious. And very very many GB....
@@Dorraj Exactly! I recently wanted to record high framerate footage for an edit (COD montage) so i redownloaded fraps , but unfortunately it hasnt been updated for years and so it didnt work in my game...
Can't wait to see making sure this setting is off added to the "pro gaming pc performance tweaks zomg" mythology alongside "disable fullscreen optimizations" and the other classic placebo performance fix lists for every unoptimized game that releases.
@@fatyoshi1456fps limits do not improve 0.1% lows. If the game is so unoptimized that you get to 60fps dips on a 400fps 99.9% then the game has a bug, it just so happens that valve waits until everyone and their mother has complained about it until they are forced to abandon the cheap script code causing the bug to even more overly engineered yet still equally as bad c++ code.
@@anonymousalexander6005 of course they don't, you limit fps to your 1% lows or 0.1% lows if they're high enough (and you don't alt-tab/pop up menu during benchmarking)
Obviously this is not competing with OBS. It isn't for people who would record their stuff intentionally. It is for those that had no intention of doing so until now, but wish they did because the cool moment you would have wanted to capture happened in the past 5 seconds. Not in the future. So starting recording "now" would already be too late. This is actually one of the biggest things I miss from Windows since moving to Fedora full-time. The game bar thingy had this feature built in for a few years now, and it worked well. Not super amazingly, but well enough. I am really thankful I can do this even more easily on Linux now-including on the Deck.
@@ethanneufeld1But it's a separate thing you have to download, learn how to use, and make a habit of launching before a game. That is _infinitely_ more work than just having it working through the software you use to launch your games in the first place. If you've used OBS before, this is not for you. This is for me, who did some really cool stuff in Blade and Sorcery a few times and I wish I had recorded it. Or that one weird bug that happened in Blasphemous 2. I'd love to be able to see exactly what happened to me. I have no intention of sharing anything. I have no reason to just record videos all the time. But a bit of a buffer so that I can press a button _after_ I saw the interesting stuff happen is definitely useful.
@@hundvd_7 I more so meant as the replacement on linux, also like I said you can have obs launch on start up with replay buffer activated so you don't have to remember start it everytime you play a game
@@ethanneufeld1 But, that's the thing. I _could_ have done this with OBS on Linux. But it's a LOT of work. And I simply didn't care enough. And most people, I wager, don't, either. It requires, _at least:_ - realize you can do this with OBS - download OBS - get to know the basic UI of OBS - set it up in OBS - then tweak it some more cause you barely know OBS - set up OBS to run on launch - have OBS running, making your PC even more cluttered But with Steam it's: - realize Steam can do this - opt in
This feature sounds incredibly useful for game developers. When you encounter a bug, steam will have already recorded it which massively helps with debugging
That's a really great point, as an unsuccessful amateur game dev, I wonder if valve is going to release any sort of API for the screen recorder, this would allow game developers to essentially add a button in-game which reports a bug, once the user presses the button it automatically opens the cropping window, and when it's cropped and saved by the user, it can then be sent to the developers. thats the gist of it at least.
The reason the export is so fast is because it's just concatenating data together. There's no encode step. Each m4s file is 3 seconds. It'll probably take at least a decade if not longer for background recording to affect the health of your SSD
Depends on the ssd, new ones have super high write lifetimes. My 2017 or so ssd is just about to hit its warranty write limit, but was never used for anything other than an os
These recordings are saved localy on your PC, so some people would like to use this steam low preset recording to later send videos on Discord, which have pretty low file size limit. and for some sharing files to friends in discord is better option than attaching it to your steam account for all your friends to see.
they're only local, you can't upload them to steam* unless you're exporting one minute or shorter clips, those can be shared for up to 48 hours with a steam link
you should be re-encoding clips anyways before you share them. hardware encoding is always going to give you huge filesizes. software encoding will sacrifice time to make the filesize more sharable at similar quality.
@@nocturne6320 The average person using the Steam recorder doesn't know what handbrake is nor that there's a difference between hardware and software recording lol
@@Pie-jacker875 takes too long and is too complicated. Most people don't know how to use something like HitFilm and don't want to play around for 15 mins with bitrate and quality settings to get a good video with ok file size. You just want to cut a clip and instantly CTRL+V it onto Discord, within 30 seconds. That's what this tool is for. Better yet, this tool doesn't re-encode the video, it cuts the file directly. Perfect.
01:54 "and explain why it'll be slowly killing your PC" My prediction: It's not saving your clip to RAM, it's saving to the SSD which may kill it. A friend of mine has a 250gb Samsung 950 pro. Within 3 years, he has managed to reached the maximum rated Total Terabytes written of that SSD. How you might ask? Nvidia Shadowplay is doing this. It doesn't cache your recording in your RAM like OBS, it continously saves it to your Disk. This will kill small budget SSDs within a few years.
Same thing to me with AMD Software Adrenalin Edition. I found out it has a setting to cache recordings to RAM *way* too late and now my SSD's slightly slower than my old HDD. It sucks.
I’ve had a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo as my boot drive since 2017, and I’ve had shadowplay on the entire time. That mf is still kicking to this day despite going well past the write limit.
This is a non-issue. Gamers using small budget SSDs likely don't have tons of RAM, and they'd rather their 8 or 16GB be used towards running the game (and their OS). Anybody recording footage should be aware of write endurance (or have a decent SSD so they don't have to be). Even at 10GB/hr, it would take 6.8 years of nonstop recording to wear down a 1TB TLC drive with 600TBW endurance. A non-issue.
One of the rare situations where having a big ass HDD running on the side is useful. HDDs might not be good overall performance but they have decent performance on continuous data like a recording.
looks like the saving of the clips is a lossless cut without re-encoding the video. kudos for doing it that way, i was trying to teach my friends avidemux or losslesscut (lately), but having this out of the box without hesitation or fiddling with codecs is awesome
Valve also updated the Steamworks SDK with ISteamTimeline so developers can include timeline features that flags important events in-game. Give it a year or two and there's going to be a lot of games supporting the feature.
Given how many problems ive had with shadowplay recording the wrong screen or the desktop instead of the game window im quite happy to finally have a baked in option for recording
For real. For how long Shadowplay has been out and how much Nvidia wants to shove GFE down our throats, you'd think they would add some basic features to Shadowplay, like NOT recording in variable framerate, or allowing us to choose what windows are recorded, or... how about not just turning instant replay off for no apparent reason...
I gave up on Shadowplay after I tried to clip things multiple times and every time I checked after the fact, it was off the entire time even though I turned it on the day before, so only options I have is OBS and this Steam thing now
There is also a benefit for developers, mostly in testing. Having custom events displayed can make recording and reporting bugs significantly faster. For those purposes the 1.5mbs setting can even make sense for rapid sharing.
@@samihookings8241 No, I am not, my computer is a bit older but I wouldn't call it a potato (i7-8700 and rx 5700xt). As an example, running a video in a game update post lags the UI really badly.
the main appeal to me even when i have shadowplay is how easy it is to share a clip at a small enough filesize to get around discords 25mb limit. its such a pain to get a shadowplay clip through editing software to render at 720p 30fps just so i can send a clip to friends. with this (and turning it down to low/medium) i can easily send a 30 second clip to friends of something that happened, PLUS even when the filesize is too big you can instead use the share button, which will generate a link to the video that will last 2 days before it expires
A bitrate slider with marked "presets" would be a start. Going from a "meh barely enough for 1080p" 12mbps straight to 24 is a big jump (especially for the resulting filesizes). But then again for 1440p, 24mbps is very likely not enough and stuff will get blocky with lots of movement. Which brings me to another point: why is there no way to set a recording resolution whatsoever?! the heck?
For steam deck I recommend getting decky loader and getting the decky recorder plug-in instead, a much better video recorder that allows you to capture clips like a switch, (even up to 5 minute long clips) and allows for regular recording too
this reminds me of playstv, it died, got replaced with medal and just stopped being as good as playstv was, had the timelines of when each kill was in your games and when rounds ended/started, now best medal can do is record a clip every single time you get a kill, cause thats the best way to go about it
i use OBS, but I will swap to this in a heartbeat cuz 99% of what i record are game clips to share with friends and use in game reviews, excited to finally have it. I had decky recorder on my steam deck before and now you get thsi.
Not really, pretty much all of the replay options out there are plagued with issues or require lots of manual intervention. I have been waiting a very long time for something like this that doesn't suck. This is Valve's first release in beta and it already feels better than all of them (minus some missing features like HDR and split audio tracks) and really is just as easy as "set up and forget". Add on to that all of the extra features like the timeline editing with direct integration into Steam's interface and overlay, along with an open API to developers, this really is a game changer.
The optimist in me says they added this ability to screen record from Steam as a way to combat ESP and other overlay cheats. Passing it onto us as a feature is a nicety so we'd be cool with having it as a thing that Steam is able to do.
If Nvidia, just use OBS, it support NVENC, it also has Replay Buffer feature and it's better than Steam's way (it saves the buffer to RAM, it's not gonna kill your drive). I also game on Linux, when I play on Windows I also use similar method, mostly because I hate geforce experience.
@@pegasusearl As far as I'm aware, Steam's method allots a maximum of the size you give it in the replay settings globally and not per game unless saved, so I'm happy giving it 120 minutes and letting it use a couple of gigs. Relieves me of the pain of forgetting to open OBS only to really wanted to have clipped something, only for the moment to have already passed
I don't think anyone was asking for this feature considering how many available alternatives there are, but it's great to see it just be an option anyone has now. The integration with CS2 highlighting round starts and kills is really good and cool feature, so I'm wondering if developers will have an option to also add integration to their own games. 5:19 Also I see Tori is a Wisadel enjoyer and I approve 👍
5:21 on Linux you can just point the recording folder to a subdirectory of /tmp/ which (on most distros) is a sort of dynamically allocated RAMdisk, and the video will be recorded into RAM instead of wearing out your disk.
As for who it's for, It's for sure for people like me, who use linux as their daily driver, and want something akin the Xbox DVR feature. I want to always have the option to clip something, and to have what I'm not clipping to just go away. This is an awesome feature!
I think there is a very real and useful part of this that you didn't touch on, super low quality seems useless but to use it for reporting cheaters or even harassment in a game like squad is a game changer. I'm a girl who plays video games and harassment is ever present and using shadow play was nice until my GPU died and I was forced to get a cheap radion card. With this new feature I can return to a semi normal gaming experience with harasses at least getting what they deserve.
@@flintfrommother3gaming That's a valid reason for reporting, actually. It's really easy to not be shitty to people for no reason, try it out sometime
3:15 I agree, 95% of people won't use this setting, but it's always nice to have it there for the people who *need* it to be able to record their clips. Better for it to be an option than for it not to exist at all, right?
I completely agree about recording to an SSD and it's why I'm glad I have an AMD gpu because AMD's software allows you to use the system memory as a buffer for the video instead of using your disk.
i like the ability to cut the desired part of the video, that's why i like radeon software and didn't want to change to recording replays with obs, even tho amd abandoned my 580 and more often than not the sound will disappear from the last part of the recording, if only steam added option for desktop recording...
If you want to post CS2 clips or even get content creation going right away, this *built in* feature is HUGE. The fact that you can limit quality to lower video file sizes in that is also awesome, in case you wanted to show off that clip in Discord, which in most cases has a hard filesize limit for attachments such as videos unless you have Nitro.
The thumbnail led me to believe this would be a deep-dive analysis on how players can capture stunning images on their computer screen when they are too daft to know how to screenshot
When I want to record a clip I download the demo, then load up OBS and record the demo replay because I'm not about to waste my hard drive space constantly recording gameplay. Good thing I'm not good enough to have many things to clip.
For those didn't know yet, OBS's similar feature, Replay Buffer, saves the recorded video to RAM first, then only write to your storage when you want it. No need to worry about your drive's life. Personally I use that with HDD.
If you're only interested in using this (or any capture software) for a 120 second long clip of something cool happens, consider using a RAMdisk for the temporary files. You should only need a gig of RAM or so, which would make no difference in performance for most modern systems.
It's gonna be neat for rhythm games because it is like a replay: if you are going to grind for a sick play, you don't need to worry about recording EVERYTHING if you want to upload it, steam will do it for you
So far we have for recording: windows game bar: alt + g nvidia shadowplay / amd relive: alt + z msi afterburner...that app which shows usages and you should always have it open and now steam as the fourth option😂
I never started recording my gameplay footage in CSGO/CS2 because the _capturing_ itself negatively impacted the frametimes (most significantly: consistency and latency). I've tried OBS in Win7 on my PC (although I know, Win8+ had a new screen capturing API for this) and OBS in KDE (X11) Linux on my laptop (juuust enough for 144 FPS in CS2). Both were screen captures rather than hooking the game. Due to the anticheat, not even OBS is permitted to hook the game anymore, on Linux it just didn't work. I hope that Valve's own solution would work well here... even though in a perfect world I'd like OBS to remain a first-class citizen too. The timeline gameplay integration is excellent. I myself, if I ever start to capture long footage, would like to have a "mark this as highlight" button. Here the game essentially does it for you.
I think that this is much better than Shadowplay or OBS Replay. As far as I know, those store clips in RAM until they're deleted or saved, so you can realistically only have it save about 10 minutes at most. They're also missing other QOL features like a built-in clip trimmer. Overall this looks like a way better solution, assuming the encoder is good, so I hope it works for non-steam games too.
