Steam Beta gets big Game Recording improvements, plus Steam Deck SteamOS 3.6.16 Beta out now

Valve released a fresh Steam Client Beta for all platforms with some big Game Recording improvements, plus there's also another small Steam Deck SteamOS Beta update.

First up the Steam Deck - SteamOS 3.6.16 "End of the Line" Beta has this one note "Fixed a system crash when hotplugging a second display in Desktop mode".

A Steam Client Beta was also released, with these changes specific to the Steam Deck:

• Fixed games stored on an external drive still showing as available when the drive is removed.
• Make the enter action on the login password entry attempt to login rather than requiring navigation to the "submit" button.
• Improve compatibility for native titles that have not been reviewed yet by launching them in the same runtime environment as reviewed titles.
• Added a setting to record microphone input alongside gameplay audio.

And the main Steam Client Beta changes:

General

• Updated embedded Chromium build in Steam to 126.0.6478.183

Game Recording

• Added support for recording with the H.265 (HEVC) video codec when supported by the machine's GPU. This is enabled by default on Windows and should provide improved recording video quality over H.264 at the same file size. Coming soon to Mac and Linux.
• Added support for recording up to 4k video resolution when using H.265 (HEVC).
• Added a new "auto" quality setting that will set the recording bit rate based on the game's video resolution. This will raise the bit rate when recording games running in 4k, to keep the recorded video sharp, and lower the resolution when running a game at 1080p to save disk space. This setting is on by default for all users.
• Added support for recording ultrawide monitors up to 32:9 aspect ratio.
• Added a setting to limit the width & height of recorded video.
• Exporting a recording (to file, clipboard or chat) will now use the machine's GPU to perform encoding and decoding when available.
• Generating screenshots from recordings will now use the machine's GPU when available.
• Fixed multiple issues where exporting a recording could fail.
• Added export settings dialog to allow custom file size or other settings when exporting a clip.
• Added video previews to the Background Recording items in the media manager when hovering them with a mouse or focusing them in BPM.
• Added video previews to the Background Recording items in the app details page's screenshot section when hovering them with a mouse or focusing them in BPM.
• In per-game settings, add the ability to record a specified game indefinitely with no specified time limit.
• Integrated the list of games where recording is disabled into the per-game settings.

Steam Input

• Fixed crash occurring when querying community controller configurations in the configurator.

Remote Play

• Added support for AV1 video streaming on high end systems.

Steam Overlay

• Fixed crash in some games using D3D9.

Windows

• This version of the Steam client will no longer run on Windows 7 or Windows 8. Users on these OS versions will automatically be opted out of the beta. See here for additional details.
• Improved detection of other computers for streaming and peer downloading when using a secondary wireless interface.

macOS

• This version of the Steam client will no longer run on macOS 10.13 or 10.14. Users on these OS versions will automatically be opted out of the beta. See here for additional details.

Linux

• Fixed some miscellaneous common crashes.
• Fixed some parts of the in-game overlay ignoring clicks when the Game Recording timeline is visible.
• Fixed slow startup on systems where the reverse hostname lookup for the loopback interface is not localhost.
• Detecting and passing commands to an already running Steam client is significantly faster.
• Added a -disable-screensaver-inhibit command line option to prevent Steam from inhibiting the screen saver when activity is detected.

Hopefully it won't take Valve too long to hook up H.265 (HEVC) on Linux, sounds great. Nice to see continued Linux improvements overall too!

Update October 4th: the Steam Client Beta was updated and re-released with this fix:

Note:

This update was re-released October 3rd with the following additional change:

• Fixed regression in beta that prevented game recording and remote play from using the GPU encoder.