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Yesterday, Valve dropped a Steam client beta update focused largely on Game Recording – the beta version’s recently added clip-capturing utility. It’s a pretty wide-spanning array of improvements, adding support for ultrawide monitor resolutions up to 32:9, the high-quality H.265 (HEVC) video codec – on Windows only for now, apologies to the Steam Deck – and the option to “record a specified game indefinitely with no specified time limit.”
You wanna be careful wielding that kind of power, mind you. I once left Auto Screen Capture running by accident, and only realised about eight hours later, after it’d filled my SSD with sixty gigabytes of desktop screengrabs. May you be more attentive in your capturing endeavours.
Here’s the relevant chunk of patch notes:
- Added support for recording with the H.265 (HEVC) video codec when supported by the machine’s GPU. This is enabled by default on Windows and should provide improved recording video quality over H.264 at the same file size. Coming soon to Mac and Linux.
- Added support for recording up to 4k video resolution when using H.265 (HEVC).
- Added a new “auto” quality setting that will set the recording bit rate based on the game’s video resolution. This will raise the bit rate when recording games running in 4k, to keep the recorded video sharp, and lower the resolution when running a game at 1080p to save disk space. This setting is on by default for all users.
- Added support for recording ultrawide monitors up to 32:9 aspect ratio.
- Added a setting to limit the width & height of recorded video.
- Exporting a recording (to file, clipboard or chat) will now use the machine’s GPU to perform encoding and decoding when available.
- Generating screenshots from recordings will now use the machine’s GPU when available.
- Fixed multiple issues where exporting a recording could fail.
- Added export settings dialog to allow custom file size or other settings when exporting a clip.
- Added video previews to the Background Recording items in the media manager when hovering them with a mouse or focusing them in BPM.
- Added video previews to the Background Recording items in the app details page’s screenshot section when hovering them with a mouse or focusing them in BPM.
- In per-game settings, add the ability to record a specified game indefinitely with no specified time limit.
- Integrated the list of games where recording is disabled into the per-game settings.
If you missed it at launch, Game Recording is a pretty tidy addition to Steam’s ever-swelling feature set, and this update makes it materially better by adding new options and speeding up encoding and decoding. While I’m not a regular videosmith – I’ll clip a malfunctioning ragdoll to laugh at later over an Old Fashioned, but little else – it is handy to have a recording function built into the launcher, rather than running alongside it as another resource-hungry app. If you currently on Steam’s main stable branch, you can give the beta a whirl by switching clients in Settings > Interface.