The Vita already has the screenshot button so would be possible to add a feature in a future firmware upgrade that lets you record 10 sec gameplay videos?

After Sony's announcement about the PS4 having video recording i don't see why they wouldn't add something like this to the Vita.

The Vita wasn't designed for that so it may not be possible. The PS4 has a secondary CPU to run the background OS level stuff such as background downloads and recording gameplay.

@jay_ray: What if you can start/stop recording manually instead of pressing a button to save the last 10 min of video?

It's probably possible but logistically they couldn't do it. Game performance would be hindered and it would have to be in terrible quality to fit onto a Vita memory card. I wouldn't be surprised if they integrate the videos into the Vita so that you can watch a video on your Vita but it seems impossible to record footage at a decent quality without making the games unplayable and file sizes massive.

Without a special chip, you will always have to sacrifice some portion of the main computation power. Console games are optimized for the platform they run on, this includes software (OS) and hardware. In contrast to PC games, they often get exclusive (or at least very privileged) access to the hardware while they are running. Which basically means no background processes, or only very few well defined ones. You would need to add a video recording background process. That is a quite complex task that would eat a significant portion of the cpu power, ram and storage io.

Games that are already released for the vita were not designed for this to happen. They may freak out if they dont get all the ram and all of the cpu.

As sony you could potentially force new released games to be designed in a way that they can deal with a parallel running video recording service. But this would mean much more work for sony and the developer and also less beautiful games, because they cannot use to full potential of the vita anymore. This would further alienate developers and result even less games. So this is most likely not going to happen unless they have already an idle cpu core dedicated to OS stuff in the current vita design that can be used for it. But I never heard about such a thing.

@jedted: I just don't think they could do it at a system level because the system is simply not powerful enough to allow for it, otherwise they could do this on the PS3. They could demand all new games to this on a software level or fail certification but this would demolish the already poor software support of the Vita. This won't happen on the current Vita but when they redesign the Vita Sony may put in a secondary CPU and more RAM to allow this but I doubt it would be worth the cost.

My pie-in-the-sky hope for this thing is that all of that crazy streaming stuff bound for PS4 also comes to Vita. Dude, let me play some PS3 and PSN games on that thing.

Inbound streaming on the vita is certainly doable. They even showed it with knack on the press conference. When local streaming from ps4 to vita works, I see no reason why it should not work from dedicated gameservers in the internet. Only streaming existing vita games from the vita to somewhere else seems impossible.

It's very possible to have a game that has video-recording functionality (in fact there's a couple of PS3 game that have that) on it's own, but a game-agnostic OS-level solution that works with every Vita game and app is impossible, because the Vita just down't have that kind overheard. Encoding video is CPU-intensive and if you don't build with that in mind in advance (like the PS4 which has a dedicated chip that only does video encoding and nothing else!), you physically don't have the resources to pull it off.

If Sony wanted to do it, they'd have to limit performance on all future games (so they look/play worse) and I don't see anyone wanting to make that trade-off.

@enigma777: You have a good point.

If only the Vita had some kind of video output feature.

It will. There was a patent about a new Vita redesign that has an HDMI port built-in and in the opening of the PS4 announcement, the guy hinted at it bringing the Vita experience to the living room (go watch it) and said we'll learn more at E3.