Recording Tribulations on the Steam Deck

This is more of an informational housekeeping article than anything revelatory.  So I just wanted to get that out of the way in case someone stumbles across this article while experiencing the same issues.  That being said, if you're reading and do happen to have a solution that works for you on an unmodded Steam Deck, please let me know.

So my issue with native recording on the Steam Deck is really two-fold, and I have no idea if they're connected, correlated, or even if one is responsible for the other.

Let's start at the beginning.  For almost a year now, Steam has integrated screen recording by either pressing a series of buttons (Steam Button + A), or you can set a single button to start the screen recording process, which is what I usually use the L5 back button for in the controller customization options so that I can press an single button instead of a combination of buttons with both hands.  Valve's idea for this function is to create clips to share on Steam, and by clips, they seem to define them as videos less than 60 seconds, usually around 30; mentioning the length of clips will be important later on, so put a nail in that one.  These video recordings are viewable in the same Steam tab as screenshots, but are located in a different file folder on your hard drive, and from what I can tell, you can't right-click a video and "show on disk" either on a computer or in desktop mode on the Steam Deck.  This happens both on my laptop and on the Steam Deck (in Gaming Mode and in Desktop Mode), so it's a feature and not a bug for some reason.  Knowing this ahead of time will be an important bit once we actually get passed the recording process.  That being said, I do know where to locate the physical copies of the recordings due to another that you guessed it, we'll get to after we cover recordings, which we'll finally get to below.

In three separate instances, most recently with Resident Evil 6, I have had videos that I've recorded freeze up on me after the first 5-10 seconds.  This video from the  4th Chapter of Chris Redfield's campaign in Resident Evil 6 is a prime example of what I am referring to.  Here you can see the video and audio start just fine, but then the video freezes while the audio continues.  Sometimes the video will briefly come back for a few seconds before freezing again.  Again, I thought this was happening when the video length was longer than 20 minutes, but the linked video is just shy of 14 minutes.  During the same play session, I had a video as short as 3:15 seconds freeze up at 0:12.  I again also thought that it might have been due to low storage space on the Steam Deck, but after playing and recording Chris' Chapter 4 recording, I had over 20 GB of free space on the hard drive.  There's a discussion post on the Steam forums from May 2025 (important to note that this was after Steam's native screen recording was released out of beta and has been available since November 2024) where like-affected people are also running into this problem with mixed results as far as solutions go, none of which I have found work for me.

The second issue* that I've had with a couple of games has happened after having recordings freeze on me, but again, I'm not 100% sure if they're specifically related or not, as in one causing the other, or if it's just a coincidence.  This is the apparently undeletable "Background Recording" file.  Unlike other video files that you can see among your screenshots, this file will let you right-click and give you the option to delete the file, except that it doesn't actually delete.  I have gone into Desktop Mode to locate the file and have been unable to locate the file to delete it.  This Background Recording file also seems to be a combination of all the videos I recorded during a single session, where I manually started and stopped and started again recordings, so the file, accessible only through the Recordings & Screenshots tab in the Steam portal, reads as being over 41 minutes long.  I know this particular file is eating up hard drive space because when I look at the Data Management tab in the system settings, it's telling me that x GB** is from Background Recordings.  It's nice to see that there are only people over on Reddit who are experiencing the exact same issue, and like the Steam forums/discussion pages, there are mixed results for how to cure this problem.

What makes this problem problematic is that there are games that I've received for the Steam Deck that I would need to record video for, where the recording became unusable.  I was able to salvage something that kind of worked for Mountains of Madness, but it was far from ideal.  When Steam rolled out native screen recording, I was excited because at the time, I was having a lot of issues getting OBS to run correctly and consistently, and this felt like the answer to my problems without having to download Decky Loader and an associated screen recording app.  Thankfully, this doesn't happen in every game, and even with Resident Evil 6, it does not happen all of the time.  While Chapters 2, 4, and 5 for Chris remain unusable, Chapter 1 for Jake came out fine.  But then Chapter 2 froze in the exact same manner.  I guess I'll comment/leave an update for the remaining three chapters for Jake's campaign and the whole of Ada's campaign, as well as other games I play, maybe.

I really wish I had a satisfying ending to this predicament, but as the opening paragraph stated, I have no answers here and can only hope that I will be able to post a fix/update soon or that someone else who has found a solution that works for them finds us here in our little shadowy corner of the Internet.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Your Circuit's Dead, There's Something Wrong

*P.S.  Of course, after I wrote this article and the night before I go to publish it, I find out that all of the Background Recording files, of which I think there were only two on the Steam Deck are now gone.  Becuase of course they would be gone after baking their existence and frustration into this article.  So it's likely that something from the Reddit thread worked in clearing out those large files, possibly after restarting the system and/or downloading a firmware update in the last couple of days.  Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that those previously undeleteable files are gone, I'm just annoyed that I now have no evidence of their existence the night before I publish this article.  Ah well.  I'll post an update if they come back.

** This "X" was a placeholder when I had mostly finished the article that I was going to replace after getting home and getting access to the Steam Deck.  Then, see the paragraph above for why I decided to leave the "X" in the article.  Not overly professional, I know, but there it is.