I'm having that happen, too. I'm on a Steam Deck background recording onto an external SSD while in Gaming Mode. It's either... it says it's recording, then when you check afterwards, it somehow recorded nothing / has a gray bar and says there is no recording data, or it happens like you describe where the visuals freeze and audio continues.

In a session I did earlier today, I brought up the Steam overlay, and that seemed to cause the video freeze issue a few seconds later since I was checking to see if the recording was in fact working while playing. The stuck frame continued for the rest of my session until I made a marker, and that got the video to behave as normal until a few seconds later where the frame got stuck again. Weirdly, another session I did afterwards had its video work flawlessly, but I didn't bring up the Steam overlay or make a marker or anything.

I've had this issue for awhile myself. Usually I was able to solve the problem by clearing space on my steam decks hard drive and restarting steam or the console. I'll know it worked cuz as soon as i hit record, the game freezes for a split second, then the console resets itself and then my recordings would work fine until i turn off the steamdeck again. Sometimes it would take a few tries to get it to work, but it usually would start working again eventually. But now, no matter what I do, it continues to have the frozen frame recordings and I've been trying for days, to no avail. Glad to see I'm not the only one this affects, just wish there was some kinda solution that fixes it permanently, or at least permanently enough where turning it off won't cause the issue to happen the very next time I turn it back on.

Originally posted by akstubblman:

I've had this issue for awhile myself. Usually I was able to solve the problem by clearing space on my steam decks hard drive and restarting steam or the console. I'll know it worked cuz as soon as i hit record, the game freezes for a split second, then the console resets itself and then my recordings would work fine until i turn off the steamdeck again. Sometimes it would take a few tries to get it to work, but it usually would start working again eventually. But now, no matter what I do, it continues to have the frozen frame recordings and I've been trying for days, to no avail. Glad to see I'm not the only one this affects, just wish there was some kinda solution that fixes it permanently, or at least permanently enough where turning it off won't cause the issue to happen the very next time I turn it back on.

The way i've been solving it is just turning off recording for 30 seconds and then restarting, and clearing all the previous background recording. I think the other commenter DF is on to something with the overlay causing it. In my case, the freeze frames always happen on the the inventory screen, which is opened by pressing tab (and subsequently opened whenever i open the overlay). I have rebound my overlay to Shift + ~ and will be testing whether or not its freeze framing going forward

I've had successes with background recording these past few days, but I'm not sure what exactly is to thank for that.

• There was a Steam beta update a couple of days ago. There was no mention of anything about recording in the update notes, though.
  
• I had previously disabled 'GPU accelerated rendering' and 'hardware video decoding' in Settings -> Interface and turned both back on. I was getting single-digit frames in just the Gaming Mode menus with them off, so that likely carried over to notification popups. At one point with both disabled, setting a marker/starting a recording would black out my screen entirely for a few seconds. And yet games were totally fine for framerates and all.
  
• I was recording on Medium quality and now am doing High.
  
• One of my problem games, RetroArch, is now played in Desktop Mode, which I know isn't relevant to you, Don. Deus Ex, which was another game that wouldn't start background recording, has been working fine in Gaming Mode.
  
• I read somewhere that it could be a Broadcasting setting that's doing it, but mine was already disabled when this was happening.

So, was it one of those or just a random "well, guess it works now"? Wish I knew!

I've had this problem when recording short Dark Souls 3 clips. Around 6 seconds of normal video, and the rest of the file is the audio continuing but no video.

This has been a issue for me too as it also effects the current stable version on my steam deck. With the exact same freezing issue.

But i still don't understand why it works occasionally... i wish i could find a consistent way to prevent the freeze but i can't find anything

I Unintalled decky loader but that didn't effect it.

I went the most recent beta build still nothing..

though i have yet to try preview build but though...

I've been having this issue as well. Restarting doesn't seem to fix it and I still have 200+GB free on my Steam Deck. It just recently started happening so I'm guessing it's an update issue.

Same problem here on the SteamDeck, with the newest stable update installed.
Manual recording seems to be working fine, but background rec does not. Doesn't matter the game.

Same problem after the last update. The video freezes while the audio keeps going.

Having the same issue. When I recorded manually it would freeze after a few seconds while the audio would continue, but when I recorded using the background recording option, it worked fine. Suddenly, however, it’s doing the same thing for the background recording option. This only started happening after I updated my deck last month; hopefully they fix it soon.

all my background recodrings are just still frame with audio
no matter what i do, steamdeck just doesn't feel like recording :<

Any updates on this? I recently got a steamdeck, tried the recording function and same thing happened to me….recording is there but the video freeze after a few seconds, left with only audio….

've reaported this issue : https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/12072
not sure how long will it take for them to fix this

Not too sure the inconsistency of the recording doesn't help things..

I'll keeping tabs on here until a stable/beta steam os update comes out that fixes the issue.

Just to keep remind anyone new that appears on the discussion

As of (June 5th 2025) the latest versions of steam os
version 3.7.8 (stable)
Version 3.7.9 (beta)
Steam recording is broken in both of these versions.