enhancements Enhanced Valve Logo For Half-Life (non-Steam version only)

Note: This only plays on the original, non-Steam version of Half-Life (WON version). The Steam version does not have video playback on startup. It was completely removed with no way to reactivate it.

For a version that works for the 25th-Anniversary update to Half-life, go here.

So here is something a little different, an enhanced version of the classic Valve logo from Half-Life when it first starts up. I know most people probably just skip these, but I wanted to make this anyway. Small little personal project that I decided to make public.

Improvements compared to the original:

-Higher FPS: Now 30fps instead of 15fps.

-Higher Bit-rate maybe?: Now ~2482Kbps, the original may have been lower but don't know the exact bit-rate.

-Higher Quality Audio: I replaced the original, VERY noisy unsigned 8-bit PCM audio with signed 16-bit PCM with little endian.

-Higher Sample Rate: Now 44100Hz instead of 22050Hz.

-Music is now in Stereo instead of Mono.

-Somehow slightly smaller file size.

-Better, slightly more animated Logo: I did not do the animation, Valve did.

The only negative here is that it is still 640x480 resolution, but I had to keep it at that to avoid the video from freezing part way through. The image quality suffers because of this also.

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More Details:

Nothing was manually or AI enhanced/remastered, what you see/hear is all naturally occurring. Even the FPS.

Amongst the files of the Source SDK Base 2013 Singleplayer, is a teaser of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (Which I think also plays at the end of Episode 1). This teaser contains a higher quality version of Valve's classic logo from Half-Life in 30fps and higher visual quality. I took that logo out of the teaser, replaced the audio with the official FLAC file of the Valve Theme from the Half-Life OST, manually trimmed and aligned the audio to match the original, converted it to the necessary codecs with FFmpeg, and here we are.

I only take credit for simply mashing these two things together since both the video and audio was made by Valve.

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~Installation~

Note: Make sure you backup any already existing files. If you want to see it before installing, open valve.avi with Windows Media Player.

1. Extract the zip file in <path-to-game>/valve/media.

2. Click yes if asked to replace existing files.

Personal Changelog:

V1.0

Initial creation.

V2.0

Adjusted resolution to 640x480 to prevent the video from freezing part way through.

V3.0

Resized logo to better match the original size of the original logo.