Streaming and recording broke on Gentoo for 52 days, and Steam's October 16 beta put both back
Steam's container client stopped recording and streaming gameplay on Gentoo with an AMD Radeon card, and clearing it took 52 days. Report 13554 went up on August 28, the fix shipped in the October 16 beta client, and the owner who filed it closed the report on October 19 after testing that build.
From the official Steam store gallery for Half-Life: Alyx. Image: Valve
Simon McVittie, a Steam Runtime developer at Collabora, named the release with a hedge attached to it. He wrote on Valve's tracker at 12:24 UTC on October 19 that "It should be fixed in or before the 2026-10-16 beta update", and asked for the report to be closed "since it has been fixed in the beta and never affected stable releases".
VA-API worked on the host and not in the container
The report is specific about the machine: Gentoo, a Radeon RX 7900 XTX, Steam client build 1787790984 on the SteamRT3 beta. Steam's own log shows the client building an encoder and giving up on it, with "libav: Failed to initialise VAAPI connection: -1 (unknown libva error)" followed by "CGameStreamVideoStageVAAPI: Failed to create device context: Input/output error".
Then it ran out of options. The log falls through both of the codecs the client was allowed to try, reports "Couldn't load libx264.so.142, x264 support disabled" and ends on "Failed to create an encoder", while the reporter's own vainfo output shows VA-API working normally outside Steam.
From the official Steam store gallery for THE FINALS. Image: Embark Studios
The container did not know where Gentoo keeps its drivers
Gentoo installs its VA-API drivers in /usr/lib64/va/drivers, which was not where the container looked for them. McVittie asked the reporter on September 23 to undo his symlink workaround and start Steam with LIBVA_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib64/va/drivers:/usr/lib/va/drivers instead, and said he was "preparing a version of pressure-vessel that knows about this Gentoo-specific path, which will hopefully mean those workarounds aren't needed any more in a future Steam Client". pressure-vessel builds the containers Steam runs games in, and in the steamrt3c client it wraps most of the client too, which is why a driver path that had always worked stopped working.
From the official Steam store gallery for Diablo IV. Image: Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
A second regression travelled with the first
The same thread carried a bubblewrap failure, "bwrap: Can't mkdir parents for /tmp/.private/mano: Permission denied". McVittie wrote on September 29 that this "unrelated regression" is Steam Runtime issue 855 and "was also fixed in 3c.0.20260928.262422", the same runtime build that carries the Gentoo fix, and on October 19 he added that it was "Included in the same beta update".
The owner confirmed both inside 93 seconds. At 12:28:13 UTC on October 19 he wrote that "the latest steam linux client beta has now working streaming again on Gentoo", which closed the report, and at 12:29:46 UTC he added that "The bubblewrap tmp permission denied error has also vanished". Both confirmations come from one person on one machine, the owner who filed it.
Valve's own note for that build mentions neither fix. The October 16 beta note carries nine changes, among them the Vulkan alt-tab freeze that had been hanging Linux games and the native non-Steam games that would not start, and names neither Gentoo nor VA-API. McVittie says the fault never affected a stable release, so only owners who had opted into the beta client ever lost recording and streaming.
