We’ve made a number of updates to the Steam Trailer Player to improve usability, quality, and bandwidth usage. Read on for the highlights from this update.
A refreshed trailer player interface that is easier to use and more responsive to your input.
The user interface of the trailer player now adapts intelligently no matter how you are using it: on a desktop computer, a mobile device (it even works well on iPhones now); and on Steam Deck or in Steam Big Picture Mode.
As you mouse over or scrub your finger over the player timeline, you’ll now see preview images of where you are about to jump to in the video.
Thanks to a change in the underlying video technology, you should see fewer pauses and hitches when jumping forward or backward in a video. You will also see seamless transitions when pressing that full-screen button.
When we reprocessed each video to work with our new trailer player, we also generated up to four sizes (360p, 480p, 720p, and 1080p), which our trailer player dynamically switches between depending on your network conditions and the size of the trailer player.
The new trailer player now handles any aspect ratio of video, properly scaling, centering, and letterboxing as necessary.
Q. How many trailers are there in the Steam store?
A. As it turns out…. a LOT. In order to update the streaming technology, we had to re-encode every trailer that appears or could appear on the Steam store. That ended up being around 400,000 video files.
Q. Why are some older videos so low resolution?
A. Some trailers were uploaded a long time ago and we no longer have the original files within the Steam system. Yes, we’re still trying to find our stash of tape backups so we can get the originals of the Portal trailer…
