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PayPalThe 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.
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R Daneel Olivaw a day ago
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 a day ago
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 a day ago
minidou a day 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 a day ago
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.
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.
Calinou 2 hours ago
I wish they would be using av1 instead of vp9, but hey, at least it's something.
I'm guessing Valve went with VP9 because it's more compatible with older macOS/iOS devices. Apple only supports AV1 in hardware, and only on devices sold after 2023.
These days on the web, it's fine to ship VP9 without any fallback format (it's supported by basically everything), but this is not the case of AV1 just yet.
Last edited by Calinou on 2 Aug 2025 at 8:42 pm UTC
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