Startup Videos

You can change the Valve startup video when playing HL2 by placing a valid avi file called "valve.avi" in the youremail\half-life 2\hl2\media folder.

Or if you are making a mod for HL2 you can place any avi file in your SourceMods\yourmodname\media folder. In order for the video to play when you start your mod you will need to create a StartupVids.txt file in the SourceMods\yourmodname\media folder. Inside the StartupVids.txt file you simply specify the filename(s) of the video you want to be played on a separate line. For example ...

media/vid1.avi
media/vid2.avi

Keep in mind that the avi video will probably need be be encoded using the Cinepak codec. (XVid does not seem to work) Also it is not known what other audio codecs are supported, other then Microsoft ADPCM.

If you want to suppress the startup videos, you can add the -novideo parameter to your Command Line.

DivX is also supported, however there appears to be a size limit to the startup video so if a video is not played then its filesize is too large, this has been tested with an avi file over 100mb.