Latest Steam Deck beta update enables even longer custom boot videos

In case you missed the news, Valve recently legitimized user replacements of the Deck’s twinkling startup screen: instead of fiddling about with Linux commands, all you need is to create a couple of folders among the device’s files and drop a .webm video file into them. Thus arrived a wave of bespoke animations ranging from the cute and clever to the unhinged, along with sites dedicated to hosting libraries of the things and rumours that Valve might start selling custom vids though the Steam Points Shop.

More ambitious works are surely next, thanks to this maximum length extension, though you’d have to be pretty dedicated to the joke to impose a 30-second startup process on yourself when the Steam Deck is usually ready to launch in a moment. Or maybe I’m just being grumpy because I somehow can’t get custom boots running at all on my own Deck.

If you’re not the subject of an arcane yet incredibly petty hex that stops things working for no apparent reason, you can try a custom boot yourself by opening your Steam Deck’s desktop mode, navigating to /.steam/root/config/, creating a folder named ‘uioverrides’, then a folder named ‘movies’ inside that. Finally, paste your desired .webm file into the movies folder. You can do this on the current Stable client software, though you’ll need to switch to the Beta branch and install the latest update for longer videos.

In other Steam Deck news, it turns out the official Docking Station is having some problems outputting video to displays with AMD FreeSync support, as well as over MST (Multi-Stream Transport, a DisplayPort feature that allows multiple monitors to connect to a single output). In a tweet from the official Steam Deck account, Valve said they’ve found the offending bugs and will ship fixes in software and firmware updates “soon”.