Valve just revamped how game trailers work on the Steam store. A new update to the trailer video player is designed to improve the quality, bandwidth usage, and overall usability of the videos. You may have noticed the new-look videos, and right off the bat, they do seem to be working much more smoothly than before.

Everything you need to know about the “fresh new user interface” is detailed in this blog post, with Valve revealing the amount of work that went into the upgrade. As you’d expect, there are a lot of trailers and videos on the Steam store, and every one of them had to be re-encoded – around 400,000 of them. However, some videos remain in poor quality.

The new trailer player works great, apart from one thing

The new video player scales better to different devices and form factors, previews images while seeking, and is much more fluid. All videos had to be reprocessed to work with the new player, which offers resolution options up to 1080p, automatically switching between them depending on bandwidth; in other words, it has finally been modernized.

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.

Source: Steam

Despite the move to the new streaming technology, many older trailers or videos are only available in woefully low quality. Valve says this is because many were “uploaded a long time ago” and the original files have been lost. One example is the trailer for Valve’s 2007 game Portal, which renders in 394p at best – even Half-Life 2 from 2004 has a 1080p trailer. They say they are “still trying to find our stash of tape backups” to get the original Portal trailer back in good quality.

Sticking with Valve games, we noticed that some of the ‘Meet the Team’ videos for Team Fortress 2 are only available in 254p on the Steam store page. These are available at higher resolutions in places like YouTube, as is the Portal trailer, but it would be nice if they were viewable directly through Steam.

It’s not a problem if you’re casually browsing through trailers on the mini player, but if you want to take a closer look, it’s pretty much unwatchable. Overall, though, the new video player changes are more than welcome – and we hope Valve digs up those lost Portal trailer files.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.