Error exporting original video capture in Steam Client

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!

Setting up Valheim Dedicated Server on Slackware64

Posted on Apr 11, 2021 by kingbeowulf

This guide will assist in setting up a Valheim Dedicated Server (VHDS) on Slackware64-current. This procedure should also work on Slackware6-14.2, although additional prerequisites may be required. The process is similar to setting up a Half-Life Dedicated Server (HLDS) with one important simplification. We will be using LinuxGSM: the Linux Game Server Manager.

LinuxGSM is a command line tools written in BASH to greatly simplify and streamline the installation of Linux dedicated game servers. The instructions are easy and straightforward.

Prerequisites

---------------

• Slackware64 multilib
• steamCMD (32-bit only)
• LinuxGSM (bash) [NOTE: LinuxGSM will install steamCMD.]

The VHDS is x86_64 while SteamCMD is 32-bit. Thus, we need to convert Slackware64 to Slackware64-multilib. Instructions for doing so are described in "Adding Multilib Capability to Slackware on x86_64 Architecture". If you've set up the Steam Client on Slackware64, then you are familiar with this process.

As the 'root' user, you first create a dedicated user account under which SteamCMD ann VHDS will run.