Poor video streaming trailer performance?

[c0mc0]

Anyone else getting this? I can play HD Youtube, Netflix etc, but I'll be damned if I can watch a game trailer on Steam without it pausing all over the place. I certainly don't have great internet but it's enough for most streaming video.

Not so bad except that the Steam player doesn't appear to do a lot of caching when you hit pause, so waiting for it to pre-load and then hitting play helps for about 5 seconds.

Anyone else getting this?

FWIW - I'm in Australia on Internode.

[Tr1ck]

Huge bump, even small screen trailers don't play smoothly. It gets even worse when I try to play a trailer full screen! My internet connection is more than adequate for this stuff and yet in Steam and ONLY Steam, I have playback issues, it seems that even with available bandwidth Steam simply refuses to precache more than a few seconds ahead, and even when it looks like it has buffered a little more the playback still stutters regularly. I have gotten to the point where I simply don't try to watch anything on Steam, I just go find it on Youtube.

[c0mc0]

Good to see I'm not alone on this. Is it really only the two of us experiencing this problems

[Tr1ck]

Managed to improve it slightly by updating my flash player but it did not fix it.

[Vip]

Im having the same problem and youtube is fine on internet explorer 11, have the following installed;
Adobe Flash Player 18.0.0.232 NPAPI
Adobe Flash Player 19.0.0.185 ActiveX
Any help appreciated.
Thanks.

Edit:
I uninstalled Adobe Flash Player 18.0.0.232 NPAPI and still have the problem. If using Steam I go to the store page for deadpool and try to play the video it stutters / buffers and seems to be worse in full screen. If I launch internet explorer and using that navigate to "http://store.steampowered.com/app/224060/" (the dead pool store page) then the video plays fine full screen. So I have a workaround but it's a pain and would prefer to have this working through the steam client/browser.
Thanks.

[Tr1ck]

I would dearly love to see the valve reps taking an interest in this thread, this is a long term ongoing problem for a lot of people by the looks of it.

[Romeo Deluxe]

This is annoying and I don't have Flash installed on any of my computers for a couple of years now. I read that the issue is with the Steam client and DASH. No where to adjust any settings. If you really want to see a game trailer I have to go to youtube to be able to see it.

You would think for Valve's own interest they would need game trailers to actually work. /boggle

[Romeo Deluxe]

My ocd insisted I find an answer and I did, this guys reddit post has made Steam store load tons faster and the game trailers work small or fullscreen. :)

Henry600 10 points 3 months ago

Create a steam shortcut to desktop.
Right click it and go to it's properties.
In the "Target" field add " -tcp" after the path so it looks something like this: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe" -tcp
Run steam using this shortcut.
Profit!?

[Gewebewurm]

Same problem here. Watching trailers in the client is absolute horror. Fullscreen makes things worse.
I have a good internet conection (i can download games in a matter of minutes), Netflix and other streaming services load perfectly fine. OS is Win10.

I will now try the workaround by snoclown, but even if it works I don't think valve can just leave this problem be. They are updating everything all of the time, so why not show the normal client a bit of love too? It has more than enough issues that need work.

[Burningfeetman]

I've had this issue for about 2 years now, and we never used to have it. Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo all work without a problem, yet Steam trailers all struggle. Really wish Steam would fix this... I have a feeling its a problem that is affecting Australian gamers.

[Gewebewurm]

I'm from Germany so it's not only a problem for Australians.

[goatinthemachine]

I'm also in Australia and have been having the same issue. I'm running Windows 10 Pro; and previously I'd updated Flash for Chrome (my default browser) and changed a bunch of it's setting (e.g. unlimited local storage, trust store.steampowered.com etc) without much effect.

Recently I tried playing videos from my browser, which helped a lot. I've also tried the fix from snoclown and it's helped with playing video within Steam. Videos now seems to buffer, although the Steam UI doesn't always show it accurately. So with full screen, I'm able to pause the video for a few seconds and then play with a LOT more of the video buffered (the buffered progress "jumps" once un-paused), removing the chop. Previously, there seemed to be a fixed limit to how much could be buffered.

My assumption is that using a browser or the Steam with the -tcp flag means the chop was probably caused by UDP dropping packets and the Steam player not dealing with that very well.

Also, Windows isn't "supposed" to have a maximum UDP buffer, so perhaps it's a Steam "feature". In places with better Internet, this probably isn't as big an issue.

[Saldek]

Same problem here. Buffering becomes really slow after a short while and the trailer becomes effectively unwatchable :/ YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, etc. all stream far better.

Had the problem with Win 7 and still have it with Win 10. Downloading games with the client is perfect however (24 MB/s).

Location: Germany (Kabel Deutschland/Vodafone)

(Will try the -tcp flag and see if it helps)

Update: I'm amazed. Added the "-tcp" flag and watched a few trailers with no problem whatsoever.

Thanks a lot, Snoclown (and Henry600 from Reddit) and goatinthemachine for that brilliant tip. It's a workaround - but if it works, it works :)

[Nanban Jim]

I'm from the States, a major metropolitan area to boot, and have this problem.
Note I only have this problem with STEAM.
Going to try the -TCP option, but since it happens in Chrome too... not holding my breath.

Nope, slight improvement, but still happens. I wonder what it is that Steam's doing where significant buffering isn't an option. :(

[Nanban Jim]

Improved very slightly when deleting Steam's appcache folder (G:\Program Files\Steam\appcache) as per this thread: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/527274088385062981/
(Exit Steam, delete folder, restart Steam).
Note this requires Steam to re-download some stuff, doesn't take long.

Checked the debug.log at C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Steam, saw repeated error:

"[0430/102151:ERROR:backend_impl.cc(2020)] Corrupt Index file
[0430/102151:ERROR:cache_util_win.cc(20)] Unable to move the cache: 5
[0430/102151:ERROR:cache_util.cc(134)] Unable to move cache folder C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Steam\htmlcache to C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Steam\old_htmlcache_000
[0430/102151:ERROR:cache_creator.cc(129)] Unable to create cache"

So I exited Steam, deleted the HTMLCache folder at C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Steam\htmlcache, restarted Steam.

I did notice the error message in debug.log went away, that's nice... but could simply be that there's nothing old enough in cache to move.

I then exited Steam, created that old_htmlcache_000 folder, restarted Steam, and I had some slight improvement.

Oddly enough, after changing nothing else, I exited, restarted, and now buffering works!
Sort of. It's a little bit intermittent. And if you skip around in a video a lot, the buffering stops until you catch up to the buffer. I can understand that.

However, one big fix did occur: Previously, when the videos were stuttering, if I went back several seconds to try and re-watch the stuttering part, the stutters stayed in the video, at the exact same points. That NO LONGER occurs! No more stutter in the buffer! Woohoo!!

[Nanban Jim]

Note it's not perfect. Most videos seem to require 1 or 2 stutters for the buffer to "get the hint."
Also note... update Flash: http://store.steampowered.com/gotflash (which is out of date, I think you want the one for Chrome. Maybe.)