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The Steam trailer video player was old and not especially great, but now perhaps it might actually work a lot better with a big upgrade.

It brings an upgraded interface with a UI that adapts to different devices, preview images when seeking through a video, faster seeking / scrubbing and transitioning to full screen, smarter bandwith use and improved handling of different aspect ratios. You can see Valve's example video below of it in action for PEAK:

As part of the upgrade, Valve said they had to go back through and re-encode every trailer that could be shown, which they said ended up "being around 400,000 video files". Whew, that's a lot huh? Some videos might be quite a low resolution though, due to being uploaded years ago where Valve don't have the original.

Valve suggest developers that uploaded trailer prior to Summer 2020 may want to re-upload, so it can be sorted into the correct format and give Steam users a better quality version.

At the same time Valve are reminding developers that they may want to hide old trailers, and ensure they actually show gameplay — get to the gameplay as quickly as possible.

Source: Valve

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Misc, Steam, Valve
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R Daneel Olivaw 24 hours ago
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omg finally. I do video engineering work for my job, and valve's attention to video has always been abysmal. This helps a ton! Finally it's modernized. Responsive, transcoding tree, etc...

For the codec, I inspected it, and it looks like they're using vp9, which is good. It's open and royalty free unlike h265 hevc. I wish they would be using av1 instead of vp9, but hey, at least it's something.

I am very surprised they are using akamai/fastly for their cdn. I would think a company like valve which must do INSANE amounts of bandwidth per year would just roll their own. Could probably save a ton of money that way, but maybe they just don't want the overhead.
Eike 22 hours ago
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Could probably save a ton of money that way, but maybe they just don't want the overhead.

I don't know anything about the topic, but I'm sure they get very special discounts?
CatKiller 21 hours ago
I wonder if, during this rework, they've fixed it so that adjusting the volume on the Deck doesn't pause the video.
minidou 21 hours ago
At the same time Valve are reminding developers that they may want to hide old trailers, and ensure they actually show gameplay — get to the gameplay as quickly as possible.
thank you Valve
R Daneel Olivaw 18 hours ago
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I don't know anything about the topic, but I'm sure they get very special discounts?

I suppose so, yes.

Check this out btw:
https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

They're doing ~ 16 terabits of transfer a day. That's actually a lot lower than I would have expected.
Jeffool 15 hours ago
I still think that Valve (and/or itch and EGS,) should have a channel that just plays trailers on loop, for when players are looking for something new and don't know what. Restream it on Twitch and YouTube with a bot that puts out a link to it, for bonus points. I think it'd be great background viewing, like Salty Bet or whatever.
miyako 6 hours ago
They're doing ~ 16 terabits of transfer a day. That's actually a lot lower than I would have expected.
I looked at the page and it is listed as 23.6 Tbps, it's Tbps.
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