Posted on Oct 13, 2025 by kingbeowulf
A while ago, Valve added a built-in system for creating and sharing your game play footage in the Steam Client. This makes it easy to record game videos "on the fly" and easily share clips without having to learn OBS Studio and video editing software. Game recording works quite well and was even ported to the Steam for Linux Client.
There is one glitch, however. On Linux, with a AMD GPU, and sometimes with an Nvidia GPU, trying to export a video or video clip from the 'Original' tab results in the error:
"Failed to export, try again"
Not very helpful. This occurs when trying to export in H.265 format - the default format Steam uses to record the video. Turns out this was reported a while back:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/11850
Steam lis looking for libcuda.so.1, even when running on a non-Nvidia GPU. You can export with transcoding to H.264 in the 'Custom' tab just fine. This works fine (you may need to install ffmpeg and the relevant codecs for your linux distro).
I found a workaround in a small blog post:
https://y.tsutsumi.io/reading-steam-game-recordings
To copy the original H.265 stream, look in you Steam directory:
.local/share/Steam/userdata/{id}/gamerecordings/clips
You will see one or more directories of the format:
clip_{game id}_{date_time in UTC}
Locate your game and open the directory. The original vidoe is the in
video/fg_{game id}_{date_time in UTC}
where you with find the video stream *.m4s files as well as the important session.mpd' XML file. Ffmpeg can read mpd file natively, so simply
ffmpeg -i session.mpd -c copy out.mp4
Other container formats compatible with H.265 and AAC audio will work as well. You now have the full original video to copy, upload, modify etc.
Have Fun!
Oct 13, 2025
kingbeowulf