this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Hah. So if you turn the background recording on it keeps a browsable timeline with metadata about which modes you were playing, presumably based on your rich presence data?
How freaked out do you think everyone at Valve was this past month watching Microsoft's Recall feature get ripped to shreds?
All joking aside, I do not trust background recording on PC. I've seen how easy it is to bypass Steam Link's restritions on streaming your desktop, I guarantee that some of these clips would end up with something I don't want in them. I do think metadata annotation on long manual recordings is potentially interesting, but it IS creepy.
I don't really see the issue with this as long as the videos are processed locally and only uploaded if the user chooses to.
Well, that was MS's argument and I don't think it flies there either.
On a console it's fine, it's only ever gonna catch a game. On the Steam Deck as well, same deal.
For a desktop PC that you also use for work and media and other stuff... yeah, I want to be extra sure that if I alt-tab from a game to quickly answer some work email that's not going to accidentally be recorded anywhere, even locally. Like Recall, I can see people who would not mind that as long as the data stays in their computer, I myself like knowing that I don't accidentally leave exposed files with potentially sensitive information laying around without my knowledge.
I mean, it's fine, it just means turning the feature off. I don't use the equivalent feature from Nvidia for the same reasons. I still think it's funny that MS got (rightfully) put on blast for basically doing this and then Apple and Valve both announced similar features immediately afterwards. It's made for some awkward mental gymnastics on the Internet recently.
The feature only records the game btw, i get your concerns but it does not record other windows
Yeah, I get that, but that's also true of Steam Link and Steam's general streaming solution (which I presume is what this is using) and it's trivial to get a different window to show up or even to get to the desktop from the in-game streaming, particularly if you have a non-Steam app in your library.
So yeah, it's gonna be on demand recordings from me... assuming the quality holds up (Nvidia's kinda sucks). Otherwise that's what OBS is for.
This won't be possible with Wayland. It'll be possible on Xorg desktops but Wayland has explicit separation of permissions per-window and must be granted as such by the user (or on steam's gamemode, probably automatically will target the game window's surface/gamescope instance)
I think it's fine because the recording is not saved unless you explicitly tell it to save. If it's anything like Nvidia's shadow play, you set an amount of time, say 5 minutes that it keeps in memory, and when you save the clip, it simply saves that file containing the last 5 minutes.
I don't think that's true of either. They're not saving all this video in RAM. Steam's system even asks you during setup to choose a temp folder for the video to sit in until you choose to save it as a clip. I don't know when it flushes that cache, but I'm assuming it doesn't and simply overwrites it when it runs out of the allocated space to allow you to go back and save something after you close a game.