Steam’s Video Player Gets Some Long-Needed Upgrades

Performance has also been improved due to “a change in the underlying video technology,” including speedier seeking and scrubbing. When scrubbing, you can now see a preview image of where you’re about to jump in the timeline. There’s also a new seamless transition to fullscreen mode, and the player can handle any aspect ratio with proper scaling, centering, and letterboxing.

Bandwidth usage has been reworked as well; now videos come in up to four sizes, from 360p up to 1080p. The player will dynamically switch quality depending on network conditions.

In order to update the video player technology, Valve employees had to re-encode every single game trailer on the Steam store, which amounts to a whopping 400,000 videos. Valve no longer has access to the original files for trailers uploaded before 2020, so they had to work with the files generated at the time of the developers’ upload for these games (“Yes,” Valve writes, “we’re still trying to find our stash of tape backups so we can get the originals of the Portal trailer…”). If you’re a game developer and you aren’t happy with the look of your trailer, you can simply reupload your video for better resolution.

This change comes in tandem with Steam’s redesigned Store menu, which launched in beta last week and is open to user feedback. It’s nice to see a platform making UI changes with seemingly genuine interest in providing a better user experience, as opposed to the god-awful liquid glass craze taking over Apple and YouTube.