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.

[Mdage]

As some may have noted (unless it is just me) the -tcp option no longer works. If you have this option in your shortcut steam now refuses to connect to the server, leaving you in offline limbo. Thank you for destroying our solution to a still existant problem steam, you would hate to give the users too much control over their own access!

[Obsidian Shadow]

Try the Far Cry Primal trailer video, that one will choke even a modern computer! Personally I found a recent computer system will run the steam videos slightly better but it is really below youtube standards.

[Nanban Jim]

Publicado originalmente por Gremlin:

OK so I've been battling with this for some time now and found an overlooked solution / setting that may hopefully help people.

Thanks for not punting to "it's your setup" and actually finding something that might work!

[c0mc0]

Publicado originalmente por Nanban Jim:

Publicado originalmente por Gremlin:

OK so I've been battling with this for some time now and found an overlooked solution / setting that may hopefully help people.

Thanks for not punting to "it's your setup" and actually finding something that might work!

It won't work, unfortunately. He's changing settings for in-home streaming and the amount of *upload* bandwidth that is dedicate to it. That's about streaming video of your own games being played and will not make any different to the playback of video in the Steam browser.

[Nanban Jim]

While that's what the options read like, I can't argue with success. Since making those changes I haven't gotten a single hiccup.

Perhaps the code for those options gets re-used in other places. That would save time (and thus, OPEX).

Then again, I don't watch ads often. Could be that concurrent with that change, Steam suddenly fixed their browser after years and years of ignoring it.

Up to you which is more likely.

[ZombieSandwich]

I'm on Windows 10, with a crappy 1.4MB down and up on a Steam build from April 25, 2017. Can confirm that adding -tcp to a shortcut makes game trailers actually play pretty decently. Before that, Steam could not play a trailer even if I baby-sitted it through once to download everything. Was testing with "What remains of Edith Finch" -- by no means an intense video.

[Tr1ck]

I have tried the -tcp thingy, it makes no difference for me, if I want to watch a game trailer I go to youtube where I can watch 1080p video with no stuttering. Tried hardware and software encoding and all sorts of other things.

[XeneX]

Same exact thing. Sucks major $&^#. Either the steam client has a bug or whatever valve is using to serve these videos is overrun. You aren't getting a response because it's not worth the investment to fix properly from the business side of things. Valve can afford to have people complaining about this. It won't affect their bottom line.

[Nerdjitsu]

I've had this issue for yearrrrs on Steam, and I've got fairly good internet (24mbps). Would love to see Valve address... for most games I typically keep another Window open so I can youtube gameplay vids because Steam's streaming is so poor, but for tiny indie vr games it can be impossible to find footage anywhere but Steam.

[Nanban Jim]

And just chiming in, it seems like every few months I get fed up, reapply the fixes here, and about half the time it gets better for a couple months.

Very confusing. Not sure why Valve doesn't just use the Chromium browser package like everyone else. Give it the Steam blue and black feel, and be done with it. It's a known package.

[hasslehound]

I've tried the various suggestions here but no luck.

For me, the problem is specifically with the full-screen videos. No problem at all when viewed in the Steam client on Windows 10 until I hit full-screen. I have no problems with any other streaming service full-screen or otherwise (Youtube, Hulu, Netflix), but the Steam client full-screen video is unwatchable delivering about 10 frames a second.

[Nanban Jim]

Publicado originalmente por hasslehaas:

I've tried the various suggestions here but no luck.

For me, the problem is specifically with the full-screen videos.

Same, full screen videos only, Windows 7x64 Pro, multiple video cards, CPUs, and motherboards over the years. It's Steam, not the OS or PC.

[jar_czar]

I don't like the -tcp solution even if it does work since it pins you to a particular invocation/shortcut of steam. The thing that has worked for me twice on two different machines is to set the "number of software encoding threads" to a higher value. It defaults to "automatic" and I've set mine to 3 which totally solves the problem for me. Go to the menu Steam/Settings/In-Home Streaming and press the "advanced host options" button. "Number of software encoding threads" is in a dropdown. Try setting it to something other than automatic. Like I said, my setting is 3 and everything runs without a hitch finally.

[vertigo]

I also have major issues with streaming videos in the Steam client, and in my case it's in the normal window, not full-screen (probably full-screen, too, but I rarely, if ever, watch them that way). It used to be bad, then it was decent for a while, then lately it's horrible. I can leave it paused for extended periods of time and it won't buffer more than a couple seconds, and it seems to get stuck at the points where it stops buffering, i.e. if/when I can get it to buffer past that point, once it hits the initial point the buffering stopped it'll freeze. Even if it's buffered out several seconds, if I click ahead in the buffered area, instead of starting playback from there immediately like it should, it just freezes for anywhere from one to several seconds, sometimes taking longer to play from that point than if I had just left it alone and let it play. So it's as if it's not actually buffered despite showing that it is. I've tried the -tcp parameter and the advanced settings tweaks, but none of them seem to have made any difference.

This is on a Win 7 x64 Ultimate computer with an i7-4770k, 32GB RAM, and an SSD, and while the internet isn't terribly fast, it's fast enough that this shouldn't be an issue. While I do often have to let YouTube videos buffer a bit, the play substantially better than this STEAMing pile of crap, and Netflix, which I've determined has streaming down better than anyone else, including Google (though that's not saying much) works with little to no buffering. And I'm in rural US, so definitely a worldwide issue, and one with Steam.

And just in case anyone from Valve happens to read this (which I doubt, as I'm fairly certain they ignore their own forums and think I might have seen one of their support reps post one time), this is costing them money. Occasionally, I'll go to YouTube to watch a trailer when I can't in Steam, but on multiple occasions I've just given up and moved on, which means Valve and the publishers and developers of those games are losing money simply because Valve can't be bothered to make their sh*t work.

[Chronon]

Publicado originalmente por jar_czar:

... The thing that has worked for me twice on two different machines is to set the "number of software encoding threads" to a higher value. It defaults to "automatic" and I've set mine to 3 which totally solves the problem for me. Go to the menu Steam/Settings/In-Home Streaming and press the "advanced host options" button. "Number of software encoding threads" is in a dropdown. Try setting it to something other than automatic. Like I said, my setting is 3 and everything runs without a hitch finally.

How would in-home streaming settings help if I've never used in-home streaming?

(Tried anyway and didn't work but didn't really make sense in the first place so not surprised.)