The Punchline #

If you want to cut to the chase, here’s how you can get your stream recording to create a video if the UI isn’t working:

  1. Navigate to your gamerecording/video directory (under .local/share/Steam/userdata/{id}/gamerecordings/video).
  2. Find the recording you’re looking for (it’s prefixed by date).
  3. Run: ffmpeg -i session.mpd -c copy out.mp4

And you’re done! There’s out.mp4.

The story #

Steam recently came out with their Game Recording feature, which is absolutely amazing! I love the ability to be able to take videos and share them.

I’ve been using it to record videos of Children of Morta in Farsi, and watch the videos later as practice for learning the language. To do so, I like to export my videos to disk, and upload them privately to my youtube account.

But sometimes, the UI doesn’t work as expected, and I can’t download the video. So what do you do?

After some spelunking, I came up with the instructions above. The long and the short of it is: steam records your game as a stream, using the .m4s format, and puts the stream information into session.mpd.

Luckily, .mpd is a native format supported by ffmpeg for input, so all you need to do is run ffmpeg!

That’s it! Happy clipping.