How does the new animated content on Steam work?

[blackjacksike]

This year, Steam has started supporting animated avatars, profile mini-/backgrounds, avatar frames and more. Usually, when people are speaking about animated pictures, they often think of GIF files. Some might think that's how the new animated content works; however, GIF has a limited range of colors and resolutions in terms of quality. It also can't go over 50 FPS. Therefore, those new features can't be based on GIF.

There are some alternatives to GIF such as MNG and APNG, which support animation. Nonetheless, it's unlikely that Steam uses such file types for the animated content since Valve generally uses its own file types to create content (e.g. VMT and VTF used for materials and textures respectively).

So what kind of files is used for the new animated content?

[rawWwRrr]

Backgrounds are using MP4. Frames are aPNG. Avatars appear to be GIF.

[blackjacksike]

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

Backgrounds are using MP4. Frames are aPNG. Avatars appear to be GIF.

I was wondering where you had your source of information so I inspected the elements on my browser instead of the client (why didn't I think of this earlier, though) and you are (almost) right.

Item type(s)	File type(s)
Profile background, profile mini-background	.jpg (still frame), .webm, .mp4
Avatar frame	.png
Stickers	.png
Animated avatar	.jpg (still frame), .gif

I'm surprised to see how high the quality is for animated avatars.

[[?]legit]

Yeah gif is an amazing format, if the source doesn't contain a huge variety of different colors, then the gif can almost look identical to the source. And there isn't any compression (after the gif is made)

[blackjacksike]

But some of them are very colorful. How is it working then? Look at the Dota 2 animated avatars.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

184 x 184px .gif <2MB

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/pointsshopitems#3