The Implementation and Features of Niche's New API

Niche has already implemented the API for markers and will make markers based on kills and such automatically, or players can still trigger their own with a hotkey. This is especially nice since CS players have to deal with anti-che blocking OBS from capturing it. The interface is well-designed, with a timeline view that displays playtime notes and allows users to add markers after the fact.

The Timeline View

The timeline view is a key feature of Niche's new API. It allows users to scroll through their gameplay footage and add markers to specific points in time. This can be useful for highlighting interesting moments or creating clips to share with others. The timeline view also includes features such as play, pause, and rewind buttons, making it easy to navigate and control the playback of recorded footage.

Clipping and Sharing

Niche's clipping feature allows users to create clips from their recorded gameplay footage. This can be done manually by clicking on specific points in the timeline view or automatically using the markers feature. The clips can then be saved and shared with others through various methods, including Steam links, manual downloads, and uploading to other platforms.

Steam Integration

Niche has implemented integration with Steam, allowing users to save their clips directly to their Steam library. This makes it easy to share clips with friends or upload them to streaming services. The feature also allows users to export their clips as MP4 files, which can be edited or uploaded to other platforms.

UX Issues and Bugs

Despite the many features and improvements of Niche's new API, there are still some UX issues and bugs that need to be addressed. One major issue is the lack of an option to save a clip at all, despite having the ability to record full 2-hour gameplay sessions. Another issue is the inability to split clips, which would allow users to create smaller clips from larger recordings.

Audio and Device Selection

Niche's audio feature allows users to select their default devices for recording and playback. However, this option is not currently available in the game, requiring users to navigate to their sound settings and adjust their default devices manually. This can be frustrating for some users, who may prefer a more streamlined experience.

Beta Testing and Issues

Niche's beta testing has revealed several issues with the game's recording feature. Some users have reported problems with capturing clips, including black screens or only showing the launching game screen even if sound is present. Others have had issues with downloading clips to their Macs from their PCs, which would error out every time.

Conclusion

Despite some UX issues and bugs, Niche's new API is a significant improvement for users who want to record and share gameplay footage. The features are well-designed and easy to use, making it a great addition to the game. With further testing and development, these issues can be addressed, and the feature can become even more robust and user-friendly.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ensteam now supports game recording this brings the ability to capture Clips or full gameplay sessions to the hands of many gamers and possibly replaces Nvidia shadowplay or AMD relive for gamers who just want a basic clipping tool but it's got some issues to access this open Steam settings go to interface switch to the beta channel here and restart and update steam now in settings you have a game recording section here you can either set up background recording where it's constantly capturing your gameplay that you can extract clips from or manual recording background recording defaults to 2 hours before it starts overriding old gameplay with new but you can extend this as much as you want holy cow that is awesome and then it gives you oh this UI is amazing so it gives you you got bit rates you can choose from you don't get codec selection or any of that yet I realize that will be complicated for the normal user but you get bit rate selection I don't like that 24 is the highest I don't like that we don't see codex but again for like normal people or whatever whatever but I love that you get to choose how long it's going to record in the background for at a given time before it just dumps it what bit rate you're at and then it tells you how much space that will take up and then you can choose where it goes so for example I have a drive that I capture to a big old Das Drive raid so I'm just going to make a Steam folder in my captures folder I cannot possibly imagine why we would need to re start steam to change a Target directory but apparently you need to do that that was a weird requirement I'm not going to lie game recording but now we have that set up now GPU Hardware encoding enabled we have that toggle again I'm assuming this is h264 only at the moment I would love to see at some point in advance codec selection unfortunately I cannot seem to get GPU encoding to work beta going to Beta every clip I've gotten thus far just comes out encoded with 264 the 24 megabit per second it's recording to 1080p which makes sense for that bit rate but so it doesn't change based on the resolution that you choose it is reporting as variable frame rate kind of like Shadow play which is disappointing but shouldn't really affect anything wow and it gives you all the commands that they use for the encoding settings so it's x264 that it's using why is it x264 we turned on Hardware encoding that's odd we've got AAC audio not at hybrid rate but that's fine it's strange that it's reporting x264 when it had an option for GPU in coding and we have it on huh but we're looking at you know basic 1080p60 game Clips but for most people like that's great that's fine the quality is okay but obviously this is just going to be for those who want the basics as bit rate control is limited and there's no codec selection but this is still neat record your microphone and choose whether it's the game only or all system audio or even game and selected programs which is really cool even more neat is the ability to manually add markers to your recording buffers timeline view to make it easier to cut out Clips after the Counter Strike 2 has even already implemented the API for markers and will make markers based on kills and such automatically or you can still trigger your own with a hotkey this is especially nice since CS players have to deal with anti-che blocking OBS from capturing it let's not whoa look at this interface look oh look at this we got a whole like timeline okay we got some playtime notes and whatever that's fine so we can click and add markers after the fact what so you can just it's still scrolling the like it's still capturing my game and I can just go back and add a marker in the preview that is insane we can manually clip from here you'll see saved Clips with a yellow bar on the timeline yeah yeah oh it's like twitch's Clipper what yeah drag the yellow handles to change the y we can zoom in on the timeline y we can set start and end points just like lossless cut play from clip start save and share we can save in Steam which is great I recommend doing that if you want to gain some following on Steam you can send it to your phone you can copy a link to it or you can export video file and this is MP4 we will inspect this file in a moment and I will just save it to my videos folder first steam te flip save done okay this is crazy however despite my original confusion it's worth noting that these markers are not for the final video file like we saw with the recent OBS update they will not show up in your video editor but rather they're just for the timeline view for clipping later bummer however there is a big glaring ux issue with this whole system right now that doesn't make a whole lot of sense we can add timeline markers but is it just is it just going to record the full 2 hours you also have the option to so we're missing a couple things one is to save a clip at all which is bizarre that might present itself once we're in a game so we can launch that and test that in a moment and we're missing the ability to split if if if they're going to do something as advanced in Niche though incredibly help you helpful mind you but as arguably as as advanced in niche as timeline markers in your video file I feel like the option to separate your microphone to a separate audio track Shadow play has it every you know whatever should be there as well as device selection for this so obviously you you're going to have to go into your sound settings and make sure your default devices are set correctly but I would still love for peace of mind to be able to choose a device here but this is a really great start uh in a moment we will test and see if we're presented with the hotkey options to save Clips in the game cuz like it it's super bizarre to give a shortcut keys and then not have recording keys so uxy that's a fail like we got so much good stuff here and then that is a massive fail um I can look yeah there's seemingly no other section for that so we we'll try with shift Tab and see if we have options there I also gave this a try on Steam deck multiple people in my Discord said they had a good time using it on their steam deck and I was looking forward to it since I'm not a fan of the quality put out by the Dei plug-in recorder however beta going to Beta And every clip I've tried capturing with the buffer or manually just comes out to either only showing the launching game screen even if the sound is there or just a black screen not sure what's going on but I really hope it gets fixed soon and of course navigating and controlling the buffer timeline to make Clips is a nightmare on the controller interface anyway actually for some strange reason all of my manual recordings are unavailable black screens I have no idea what's going on there your background recordings are not stored in in a traditional media container but instead in a bunch of tiny chunks in a container that I can't seem to get anything to play it would have been nice to be able to just grab these manually recordings can be shared through the community tools on Steam links sent to other people manually downloaded to edit or upload as you wish or sent to another steam running computer to be downloaded I also had an issue here where downloading the clips to my Mac from my PC would error out every time however I was able to download a clip on my phone hopefully that gets fixed soon ultimately this is a really neat update that further spreads the capability to record gameplay clips and share them one that valve did not need to do it doesn't directly earn them any money but it just continues to provide more value to the player I hope they keep working on this and expand the live stream capabilities too the vot of the whole stream where I was first initially taking a look at this is linked below Remember To Be Kind Rewindsteam now supports game recording this brings the ability to capture Clips or full gameplay sessions to the hands of many gamers and possibly replaces Nvidia shadowplay or AMD relive for gamers who just want a basic clipping tool but it's got some issues to access this open Steam settings go to interface switch to the beta channel here and restart and update steam now in settings you have a game recording section here you can either set up background recording where it's constantly capturing your gameplay that you can extract clips from or manual recording background recording defaults to 2 hours before it starts overriding old gameplay with new but you can extend this as much as you want holy cow that is awesome and then it gives you oh this UI is amazing so it gives you you got bit rates you can choose from you don't get codec selection or any of that yet I realize that will be complicated for the normal user but you get bit rate selection I don't like that 24 is the highest I don't like that we don't see codex but again for like normal people or whatever whatever but I love that you get to choose how long it's going to record in the background for at a given time before it just dumps it what bit rate you're at and then it tells you how much space that will take up and then you can choose where it goes so for example I have a drive that I capture to a big old Das Drive raid so I'm just going to make a Steam folder in my captures folder I cannot possibly imagine why we would need to re start steam to change a Target directory but apparently you need to do that that was a weird requirement I'm not going to lie game recording but now we have that set up now GPU Hardware encoding enabled we have that toggle again I'm assuming this is h264 only at the moment I would love to see at some point in advance codec selection unfortunately I cannot seem to get GPU encoding to work beta going to Beta every clip I've gotten thus far just comes out encoded with 264 the 24 megabit per second it's recording to 1080p which makes sense for that bit rate but so it doesn't change based on the resolution that you choose it is reporting as variable frame rate kind of like Shadow play which is disappointing but shouldn't really affect anything wow and it gives you all the commands that they use for the encoding settings so it's x264 that it's using why is it x264 we turned on Hardware encoding that's odd we've got AAC audio not at hybrid rate but that's fine it's strange that it's reporting x264 when it had an option for GPU in coding and we have it on huh but we're looking at you know basic 1080p60 game Clips but for most people like that's great that's fine the quality is okay but obviously this is just going to be for those who want the basics as bit rate control is limited and there's no codec selection but this is still neat record your microphone and choose whether it's the game only or all system audio or even game and selected programs which is really cool even more neat is the ability to manually add markers to your recording buffers timeline view to make it easier to cut out Clips after the Counter Strike 2 has even already implemented the API for markers and will make markers based on kills and such automatically or you can still trigger your own with a hotkey this is especially nice since CS players have to deal with anti-che blocking OBS from capturing it let's not whoa look at this interface look oh look at this we got a whole like timeline okay we got some playtime notes and whatever that's fine so we can click and add markers after the fact what so you can just it's still scrolling the like it's still capturing my game and I can just go back and add a marker in the preview that is insane we can manually clip from here you'll see saved Clips with a yellow bar on the timeline yeah yeah oh it's like twitch's Clipper what yeah drag the yellow handles to change the y we can zoom in on the timeline y we can set start and end points just like lossless cut play from clip start save and share we can save in Steam which is great I recommend doing that if you want to gain some following on Steam you can send it to your phone you can copy a link to it or you can export video file and this is MP4 we will inspect this file in a moment and I will just save it to my videos folder first steam te flip save done okay this is crazy however despite my original confusion it's worth noting that these markers are not for the final video file like we saw with the recent OBS update they will not show up in your video editor but rather they're just for the timeline view for clipping later bummer however there is a big glaring ux issue with this whole system right now that doesn't make a whole lot of sense we can add timeline markers but is it just is it just going to record the full 2 hours you also have the option to so we're missing a couple things one is to save a clip at all which is bizarre that might present itself once we're in a game so we can launch that and test that in a moment and we're missing the ability to split if if if they're going to do something as advanced in Niche though incredibly help you helpful mind you but as arguably as as advanced in niche as timeline markers in your video file I feel like the option to separate your microphone to a separate audio track Shadow play has it every you know whatever should be there as well as device selection for this so obviously you you're going to have to go into your sound settings and make sure your default devices are set correctly but I would still love for peace of mind to be able to choose a device here but this is a really great start uh in a moment we will test and see if we're presented with the hotkey options to save Clips in the game cuz like it it's super bizarre to give a shortcut keys and then not have recording keys so uxy that's a fail like we got so much good stuff here and then that is a massive fail um I can look yeah there's seemingly no other section for that so we we'll try with shift Tab and see if we have options there I also gave this a try on Steam deck multiple people in my Discord said they had a good time using it on their steam deck and I was looking forward to it since I'm not a fan of the quality put out by the Dei plug-in recorder however beta going to Beta And every clip I've tried capturing with the buffer or manually just comes out to either only showing the launching game screen even if the sound is there or just a black screen not sure what's going on but I really hope it gets fixed soon and of course navigating and controlling the buffer timeline to make Clips is a nightmare on the controller interface anyway actually for some strange reason all of my manual recordings are unavailable black screens I have no idea what's going on there your background recordings are not stored in in a traditional media container but instead in a bunch of tiny chunks in a container that I can't seem to get anything to play it would have been nice to be able to just grab these manually recordings can be shared through the community tools on Steam links sent to other people manually downloaded to edit or upload as you wish or sent to another steam running computer to be downloaded I also had an issue here where downloading the clips to my Mac from my PC would error out every time however I was able to download a clip on my phone hopefully that gets fixed soon ultimately this is a really neat update that further spreads the capability to record gameplay clips and share them one that valve did not need to do it doesn't directly earn them any money but it just continues to provide more value to the player I hope they keep working on this and expand the live stream capabilities too the vot of the whole stream where I was first initially taking a look at this is linked below Remember To Be Kind Rewind\n"