Screen recording

The capture button () can be used to take screenshots and record game play videos. What you can record is decided by the cartridge itself, so a cartridge might enable captures for only portions of the game, or not support the feature altogether.

Screenshots

Press (Capture button) once to take a screenshot of the running cartridge. The screenshot will be in the dimensions the game uses, but not necessarily the dimensions of the Kate screen. For example, Bitsy games are usually 512x512 pixels, and screenshots of Bitsy games will maintain that resolution, even if your screen is configured for 1200x720.

Screenshots are stored in Kate as a loss-less PNG; compression is managed by the browser engine you’re using, so some browsers may not apply any compression to it. There’s a limit of 10 MB to each individual screenshot.

Video recording

Hold (Capture button) for one second to start recording the cartridge’s screen. Hold it again for another second to stop recording and save the video. Kate can record up to one minute of gameplay in this manner (and up to 128 MB for a single video). Recording is done in the cartridge’s original resolution, regardless of what resolution you’re using for Kate.

Video captures are done in WebM using Google’s VP9 codec and the default browser’s configuration for the video quality. Encoding is likely done by the browser software, so, in slower devices or more demanding games, it can impact your game play as it requires more resources from your device’s processor.

Note

Currently Kate does not support recording the audio from the game. This feature is planned for a future version, but currently you will only be able to record the screen.

Viewing and managing

Screenshots and video recordings taken from games are stored locally in Kate and can be viewed from the Media Gallery application. You can access this application by pressing (Berry button) and selecting Media Gallery (if you do so while running a cartridge, the gallery will be filtered to media you’ve captured from that cartridge).

In the media gallery you can view screenshots and replay video captures. You can also download these media files to your device by opening them in the gallery, then pressing (Menu button) and selecting Download. This is also how you can delete individual media files in Kate.