GoodBit 1.7.0

Your games look like games now, and the pictures stop taking half a minute to appear.

Steam's artwork, off your own disk

Steam has already downloaded the box art, hero image, logo and icon for every game whose library page it has ever drawn. On a normal machine that is around a thousand games sitting in Steam's own cache. GoodBit reads them.

The sidebar now shows each game's real icon where Steam has one, and the dot it always used where it does not. A Steam game also gets Play on Steam in its menu.

There is nothing to sign in to, nothing to configure, and no network involved. If Steam is not installed, or a game came from somewhere else, everything looks exactly as it did before.

Games named after an executable, cs2 or Headliners-Win64-Shipping, will not match by name. That is the next piece of work rather than an oversight.

Pictures that used to take half a minute

This is the bigger change, and it applies to everybody recording in HDR, which is most people with a modern setup.

Every frame had its colour converted one pixel at a time, on the processor, at the recording's full size, for a picture that ends up a few hundred pixels wide. Doing the shrinking first, on the graphics card, is the same picture for about a hundredth of the work.

• The strip of stills on the trim page: 28 seconds, now 3. On a 29 second clip.
• Thumbnails are about twice as fast to make, and a quarter of the size on disk.
• The library holds far less in memory. Thumbnails were kept at the recording's own size, so a screen of cards was carrying close to a gigabyte of decoded images. It is now about a seventh of that.

Your thumbnails are made once more after this update, at the smaller size, and then left alone.

Fixed

• Some clips showed a black card no matter how often you refreshed. The graphics card refuses to decode certain files even when it looks like it should, and the picture was being given up on rather than made a slower way. Both the thumbnail and the trim page's strip now fall back.
• Trimming a clip could fail with "resource busy or locked". The app was still reading the file to build a picture of it. It now stops that work first, since that picture is about to be wrong anyway.
• The scan disagreed with the library. It counted hidden games and the header did not, so the two numbers differed with nothing to explain the gap. It now says both.
• Claude Desktop warned at every start about a GoodBit entry it could not read. Its settings file only describes servers it starts itself, so GoodBit no longer writes one, and offers the address to paste instead.

Installing

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Any 1.0.0, 1.2.x, 1.3.x, 1.4.x, 1.5.x or 1.6.x install updates itself. A 1.1.0 install cannot start and has to be replaced with this installer directly.

Windows will interrupt you once. These builds are not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC" the first time, More info, then Run anyway.