Surprised that recording max duration from "Record in Background" setting menu applied when in "Record Manually" mode -- lost some footage

[Smitheroons]

Hi,

Here's something I ran into today while testing Steam Game Recording...


SCENARIO:

I just recorded about 2 hours and 6 minutes 18 seconds of footage, apparently. But when I went to view it back and export it, I noticed the first 6 minutes and 18 seconds are gone. This seemed totally random at first.

But when I think about this for a moment... this is exactly 2 hours of footage I have left. I never used the "Record in Background" mode, so I wasn't paying much attention to its settings. But when I went into the menu for that mode to check on it, I saw that, had I been in "Record in Background" mode, of course the 120 minutes default recording length would apply.


ISSUE:

Having this limit from the "Record in Background" mode applicable for other modes is unintuitive. I'm still not sure if this is a bug that the first 6 minutes and 18 seconds of my recording session are gone, or if it's just not very well advertised in the UI that this will happen?


MY FEEDBACK:

Please consider *not* applying any recording length limit and keeping all of the footage when in "Record Manually" mode, regardless of the recording length limit from the "Record in Background" mode.

OR at minimum please communicate more clearly that the background recording time limit is applicable in "Record Manually" mode as well.


THANKS: Thanks for developing this feature, I look forward to testing it and hope it shapes up to be a reliable and relatively bug-free option.

[Smitheroons]

Also, on a slight tangent:

PLAYBACK OF THE ORIGINAL RECORDING IN VARIOUS MEDIA PLAYERS AND/OR EXPORTING WITH FFMPEG ("SESSION.MPD" ISSUE?):

I am *usually* able to play the original clip in mpv (by dragging the ".mpd" file onto the mpv player window), and/or losslessly stitch the ".m4s" segments together using FFmpeg... but this time I had to edit this line of the "session.mpd" file to make that work:

Before:

	<Period id="0" start="PT6M18.0S"> 

Edited (working):

	<Period id="0" start="PT0.0S"> 

Without doing this, only a single segment of 3 seconds of video would be played in mpv or saved out by FFmpeg. (Timeline view in Steam "Recordings & Screenshots" view worked fine without needing this tweak.)

FFMPEG NOTE:

The command to stitch together the original recording losslessly with FFmpeg, without a need to re-encode, is as follows:

ffmpeg -i "C:\path\to\session.mpd" -codec copy output_filename_here.mp4

(But I needed to edit "session.mpd" as mentioned above for this to work proerly *this time in particular* -- usually I don't have to do that. I guess having the first segments of the recording gone may lead to this situation??)

[Smitheroons]

Forgot to mention:

Version of steam: 1731433018
Platform: Windows
The model of your computer's graphics card: intel UHD 770 (when I ran into this issue)
Your graphics driver version: 32.0.101.5972 (2024-08-19)
What game you were playing: Tomb Raider (2013)
Any other game recording software you are also using: None at the time
The sequence of what happened and what you observed:

Sequence of events is as mentioned above... Not sure if related, but there was also a partial Game / Steam crash at one point before this occurred. In Tomb Raider, I opened the Steam overlay, clicked the button in the overlay to start a recording, opened some widgets in the overlay (Game Recording view widget, Images and Videos (is that the name??) widget. This lagged quite a bit at this point, the game crashed, and Steam seems to have partially crashed. Later on after the recording session, I noticed a hung "Steam Web Helper" process with the window title "launching..." or similar. So... Maybe that interfered with the recording afterward? IDK.

I think the button in the overlay is a bit unreliable/buggy. I am starting to think the Ctrl + F11 hotkey is the only properly reliable way to start a recording at the moment in Steam Game Recording? Maybe. Yeah, the overlay "Start Recording" button seems a tad risky/buggy.


If I can be of more help, let me know. Once again, thanks for making this!

[UltimateTobi]

I have the same issue. I went into settings, chose Record Manually, and recorded 2h22m of footage, but the first 22m are "gone" (meaning if you put the marker there, it says "No Recording Available"). The clip even shows the length of 2h22m in Recordings & Screenshots, but the first 22m aren't playable, and the clip starts at the 22m mark.

What is the work around? Switch to Record in Background and enter an arbitrarily high amount of minutes, then switch back to Record Manually?

I am really paranoid to use that feature now, and it was my first time, too. I am glad I didn't record anything of substance.