Recently I ran across a new “couch co-op” demo called Spook-a-boo in a post on Reddit. It looked fun, but I really wanted to know if the game was playable on Steam Deck so I gave it shot – works great! Deck Verified level of fully functional. Not bad for a game where the devs said “we haven’t tested the game on steam deck.“. Of course, *I* know it works, but I wanted to show that off by uploading a game clip to YouTube and … thats where it gets hard.
The Steam Deck doesn’t allow you to share most methods for clips over 60 seconds. It doesn’t allow you to send clips to your PC over 100mb. This sub-5mn video is 255mb, so what to do? Well it’s totally doable to get the full thing off your deck but it’s a little bit annoying and requires you be comfortable at the command line. Lets dive in:
- “Step” One – Enable SSH on your Steam Deck
- SSH into your deck.
cd ~/.local/share/Steam/userdata/cd <your-steam-id>/gamerecordings/clips/- Now this is where you gotta start digging. You should see one or more folders that look like clips_XXXXX_YYYYY_ZZZZZ. The XXXXX is the steam app ID, the YYYYYY is the date in ISO8601/RFC3339 style, so today (2025-02-14) sans the dashes. No idea what ZZZZ means. In this case I’m in
clip_3234320_20250214_181258. cd video- In here I had one folder named fg_XXXXX_YYYYY_ZZZZZ, seemingly same number formats as before, so into
fg_3234320_20250214_180820for me. (Note: I do foreground recording, where you must press Steam+A to start/stop recording. This folder may be bg_XXXXX_YYYYY_ZZZZZ if you do background recording) - Ok, congrats, we’re in the video folder now. Looking around you should see a bunch of chunk-steamX-YYYYY.m4s files and others. Now to “convert” the video per reddit
cat init-stream0.m4s chunk-stream0-*.m4s > video.mp4cat init-stream1.m4s chunk-stream1-*.m4s > audio.mp4ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio.mp4 -c copy output_video.mkv- Get your current folder location with pwd, it should look something like: /home/deck/.local/share/Steam/userdata/1234567890/gamerecordings/clips/clip_3234320_20250214_181258/video/fg_3234320_20250214_180820
- Open a new terminal and SFTP (or use filezilla or similar GUI client) into your Steam Deck
cd /home/deck/.local/share/Steam/userdata/1234567890/gamerecordings/clips/clip_3234320_20250214_181258/video/fg_3234320_20250214_180820get output_video.mkv- Done!
That’s it, super easy (/s)! You can open that output_video.mkv on your computer using something like VLC, but it should also upload directly to YouTube as is. Since my deck was in “Disable Frame Limit” mode, the file is a 720p60 video.
As a reminder, you may want to rm audio.mp4 video.mp4 output_video.mkv on your Steam Deck when you’re done. And delete the game recording in your media, to save your precious storage space.
