Need an easy way to capture those awesome moments when you're playing Linux games? ReplaySorcery is what you need, and the developer has been very busy with it.

ReplaySorcery is a bit like AMD ReLive or NVIDIA ShadowPlay Instant Replay. The idea is simple: while running it stores around 30 seconds of your screen and audio in memory ready to dump it into a video file for you. It works, and really quite well too.

Since we last wrote about it there's new features aplenty including: audio capture, options for changing output quality, VA-API hardware acceleration, local config file support, the ability to not run as root and more. It's quickly becoming a great short-capture solution.

It works exactly as you want it to. Set it up as a systemd service, then at the quick touch of the hotkey Ctrl+Super+R you get a video dumped into your Videos folder like this:

Game Featured - WHAT THE GOLF?

That was taken with no adjustments to the configuration, everything at the defaults and it really does seem to do the job exactly as you want it to.

Great stuff. Check it out on GitHub .

Have some trendy Corsair hardware and you're a Linux user? You're in luck as ckb-next is a great open source alternative to their usual Windows-only applications.

Much like OpenRGB , it's community made and not officially supported by the hardware vendor. Don't let that stop you though, they're filling a gap for Linux users and ckb-next is actually great. For my own Corsair Strafe keyboard, it works really well.

With the latest ckb-next 0.4.3 release they've added in support for the Scimitar RGB Elite and also the Nightsword RGB. So the full list of devices is now quite long. Other new features include the ability to turn lights off after a set time (X11 only), macros will now loop when a key is held down, the macro UI itself went through an overhaul, modes can be set to automatically change based on the currently focused application (X11 / XWayland only) and the application now supports translations too.

Quite a big release then looking at that! It also include a bunch of quite important bug fixes too with some freezes solved, layouts for K68 / K65 / K63 and M95 were fixed, mouse settings get restored properly when resuming from suspend, working input again on Wayland and more.

While I like OpenRGB and appreciate it trying to cover a huge amount of different vendors, I find ckb-next works better for my own device. I also like that ckb-next shows you exactly what to do when starting it for the first itme.

Find ckb-next up on GitHub .

Another surprise for 2020! Blender has pulled in yet another major company to help fund their awesome free and open source 3D creation suite.

Not long after Facebook joined in , we now have AWS (Amazon Web Services) funding Blender at a Patron Member meaning they will give the Blender Foundation at least €120K a year and they've commited themselves to three years. This funding is going towards improving Blender's character animation tools development.

From the press release :

“We’re excited to continue to expand our support for open source solutions for our customers in the digital content creation space.” said Kyle Roche, GM of Creative Tools. “The Blender Foundation has been an industry leader in providing production-grade open source software solutions, and we look forward to helping our mutual customers work more efficiently than ever before through continued improvements in Blender.”

“It has always been my preference to work closely with industry talents on improving Blender,” said Blender chairman Ton Roosendaal. “Thanks to AWS’ support we can recruit additional top developers to help us bring character animation in Blender to new heights.”

Currently it seems like they don't have the people to work on it, as the post mentions they will "start recruiting" in Q1 2021 based on when travel and meeting restrictions start getting lifted.

What do you think to all these companies announcing their support on Blender over the last year or two? Pretty amazing to see so many companies seemingly just wake up to how important open source is.

After only two Release Candidates for testing, OBS Studio 26.1 has now officially rolled out with some fun new features for all supported platforms. If you're planning to do any sort of video creation on Linux, OBS Studio is now practically the standard. It's our go-to solution for everything when it comes to video creation (and plain audio recording since it has some easy real-time filters) and being free and open source is a nice big plus.

This release follows shortly after announcing YouTube as a new sponsor , so they have plenty of funding to keep bringing on new and advanced feature releases.

Game pictured - the excellent Children of Morta available from GOG , Humble Store and Steam and the December Humble Choice also has it!

What's new in OBS Studio 26.1, here's the release highlights:

• Added Virtual Camera output on Linux (requires v4l2loopback-dkms) and macOS
• Added the ability to use a separate audio track for the VOD when using Twitch
  • If using Simple output mode, enable "Enable Advanced Encoder Settings", and enable "Twitch VOD Track (Uses Track 2)". Twitch VOD output will then be on audio track 2
  • If using Advanced output mode in the Streaming tab, enable "Twitch VOD Track" and select the track you'd like to use for it
• Added OpenBSD support
• Added the ability to ingest captions coming from Decklink devices via "Decklink Captions" from the Tools menu
• Added hardware decoding options for stinger transitions
• Added an option to duplicate filters in the right-click context menu of filters
• Added ability to copy and paste a single filter between sources
• Added HLS support and ingests for YouTube
• Added a Replay buffer save event to the frontend API

Various bug fixes also made it in like properly warning you of more than one instance running, which can cause some issues (especially with Virtual Camera). There's also some helpful UI tweaks, like showing you the max limitations of various streaming services.

You can grab OBS Studio from the official site .

A fresh Beta update for the Steam Client has rolled out and it seems Valve have begun modernising more parts of the UI, along with Linux fixes.

For the Steam Library, they've now ripped out the old Properties dialog with one that more closely matches their newer design style found elsewhere like with chat settings and they also fixed displaying the coming soon date for a pre-loaded game.

Here's a quick look at what it looks like (click to enlarge) in the new Beta:

There's a whole new design with a sidebar instead of tabs along the top, with a box for launch arguments now just always visible and a whole page just for Compatibility which is where you will find the Steam Play settings now. Overall, it looks nice and sleek and seems to do the job just fine as before. I'm sure it will annoy someone though, change always does.

Just for Linux - Valve also improved the performance of processing incremental Vulkan shader database updates, they fixed several issues around skipped Vulkan shader processing continuing in the background after a game has started and for NVIDIA GPU users they've currently disabled shader processing due to driver issues that are "being looked into". Hopefully NVIDIA will be able to sort that soon to give us all a better experience.

A new networking option was also added:

P2P connections now may attempt to negotiate a direct connection (punch NAT), if needed, to prevent connections from having very high latency. Added an option in the In-Game settings panel to control when your IP address is shared.

SC Controller is a pretty essential standalone user-mode driver and configuration UI for working with the Steam Controller, and it just got the first stable update in some time. It enables you to use your Steam Controller fully outside of Steam, and it works really damn well.

While the developer has been working on an experimental c port, others have submitted a few essential fixes so a new release went up. One major issue is with most modern Linux distributions moving to a major Python update, which broke SC Controller. Thankfully, as of the v0.4.8 release that's not so much a problem with the AppImage now working on Ubuntu 20.04 and comparable distributions.

Testing on an up to date Arch Linux install (using EndeavourOS), the AppImage worked perfectly!

Additionally, this update all pulls in these changes and fixes:

• Hip fire style action for trigger
• Added DualShock 4v2 over Bluetooth udev rule
• Button labels on Gyro Tilt mixed up
• Cemu hook not working with Dolphin Emulator
• Radial menu drawing broken on HDPI displays
• Gesture recognition not working with DS4
• "Confirm menu selection by releasing" not working at all
• Moving STICK and LPAD at once can make buttons stuck
• Issues with non-ascii (and especially Chinese) characters in profile name

You can find it on GitHub .

Valve have pushed out the latest updates for the Steam Client to everyone, and this update is a little on the exciting side with new hardware.

When it comes to new controllers being released, Valve seem to act pretty quickly on getting it all hooked up with Steam Input. As of this Steam Client release, you should find that the Sony DualSense (PlayStation 5 controller) should now work including trackpad, gyro, lightbar, and rumble functionality with any games that support Steam Input. Valve also added in a directional swipe mode for trackpads and gyro, better support for games that use raw input and some bug fixes.

On the Linux side things get interesting too. Not only have Valve improved the performance of Steam's web browser they also noted all these fixes and improvements just for Linux:

• Updated steam runtime to v0.20201203.1
• Improved the filtering of available compatibility tools in the game properties dialog
• Fixed launching of non-Steam games over Proton 5.13
• Fixed games not getting stopped via the 'Stop' button in the client UI
• Added auto-migration of Steam libraries using the old 'SteamApps' directory casing to 'steamapps' when possible. Users will be warned if the transition is needed but auto-migration fails.
• Improved how host LD_LIBRARY_PATH settings are picked up and transformed for the Steam runtime
• Improved host LD_LIBRARY_PATH support
• Fixed blank UI windows appearing at startup on some systems

See the announcement here .

Seems that Blender and Godot Engine aren't the only open source projects pulling in wide support, as OBS Studio has announced a new funding partner.

Announced yesterday, December 7, the blog post mentions that YouTube are now their newest Premier Sponsor which is the highest possible level to support OBS Studio. So they now join Twitch and Facebook by giving at least $50,000 in funding over a year. It's not clear how much because the level below Premier at Diamond as the $50K minimum on it so it seems they're doing quite well.

We're excited to announce that YouTube has become a premier sponsor of the OBS Project! Since the earliest days of the program, a large number of our users have used OBS to create video content specifically for YouTube, whether live-streamed or recorded for post-production. We're incredibly humbled to have YouTube, the largest content creation platform on the internet, as one of our sponsors.

YouTube is a pillar of creativity in the internet community, serving as a nexus for people to share all kinds of content, including live performances, live streams of video game content, educational resources, product reviews, comedy sketches, and much more. It pioneered a new generation of video content across TV, computer and mobile devices, while also providing a platform that allows anyone to create and grow a career out of video content creation.

The OBS Project team is proud to have a role in serving content creators on YouTube with free and open source tools, and are incredibly grateful to YouTube for supporting us as we continue to meet those needs!

OBS Studio

Nice to see too, since OBS Studio has become absolutely essential for all types of video content creators (us included). We use it for all our livestreaming on our Twitch and a little on our YouTube too. It makes video creation pretty darn simple, allowing you to record audio and video together with all sorts of overlays and effects. Since it's free and open source, anyone can work with it and learn from it too.

See more on the OBS website .

Love your flashy lights, your colourful RBG LEDs covering your computer and your desk? How about controlling them from Linux? OpenRGB is your friend.

Supporting both Windows and Linux it brings the mess of vendors and their highly specific applications under one free and open source roof. It's a fantastic project and one that I love to see become bigger and better. Set colours and effect modes, setup profiles for them, get a tidy command line interface and a sleek UI and much more.

Here's what's new in the latest release:

• Settings have been consolidated into a new file OpenRGB.json, using JSON format
• Settings tab allows enabling and disabling devices from the user interface
• Configuration files are stored in an XDG-compliant configuration directory (%APPDATA%\OpenRGB or ~/.config/OpenRGB)
• Speed up detection by limiting I2C/SMBus detectors to specific PCI IDs
• Dark theme for Windows
• Linux binary lower cased, improved Debian packages, and providing them with release
• Fixed profile loading, deleting

Support for devices was expanded with this release too with these newly added:

• EVGA GPU (V1 and partial V2 - 1xxx and 2xxx series) support
• New SteelSeries devices - Apex Pro TKL, Old Apex
• Philips Wiz support
• Linux LED sysfs support
• Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB support
• Sony DualShock 4 support
• Logitech G213 support
• ASUS Mice support - ROG Gladius II Core, ROG Gladius II, and ROG Gladius II Origin
• HyperX Fury Ultra mousemat support
• SteelSeries Apex M750
• ASUS TUF gaming laptops on Windows (already supported via Faustus on Linux)
• Cooler Master ARGB controller support

There's plenty of other enhancements to existing supported hardware and bug fixes too of course.

You can grab OpenRGB from GitLab .