Vid watching should now be easier to navigate and come with less sudden quality jumps
If you’re the sort of person who likes to take in plenty of trailers when you’re hunting for new stuff to play on Steam, Valve have just put out an update that should make doing so a bit more pleasant. The pipe-themed platform operators have casually gone through hundreds of thousands of videos as part of an effort to make Steam’s trailer player easier to use and less likely to run into hitches as it shows you the video games.
To put it how Valve do in their news post about the changes, they’ve improved the player’s “interface and streaming to help you browse more quickly”. So, much like the Steam store revamp that’s currently in beta, Mr Newell and co want you to be able to zip around at the speed of sound.
Starting off with the new user interface, Valve say it’ll be “more responsive” to whichever sort of clicking you’re doing. For instance, it’ll now automatically realise whether you’re on desktop, mobile (“it even works well on iPhones now”, Valve boast), Steam Deck, or using big picture mode, then adjust accordingly. Jumping to different bits of a video will see you served a quick preview, while doing either that or hopping into full screen “should see fewer pauses and hitches”.
Pretty obvious quality-of-life stuff there, but it’s far better to have than not. To make the video streaming better, the Steamy folks say they’ve undergone what certainly sounds like a pretty beefy bout of scrawling through their trailer back catalogue.
“In order to update the streaming technology,” they wrote, “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.” Oof. Holy admin, Batman. The result of that work is that these revisited trailers now have up to four quality options they’ll automatically switch between based on how much net bandwidth you’re packing at a given time, with the new player also adapting to different aspect ratios.
So, you’re not guaranteed 1080p for every vid, but it seems you should at least get a version that’s of decent quality and won’t freak out if you do a single mouse click. Valve admit there are older trailers which are of very low resolution, but suggest they can do nothing about this because the original files are no longer lurking in Steam’s system.
Interestingly, this is the case with one of their own games in the original Portal. I’ve checked and your options for that trailer are limited to 360p and 394p. Don’t worry, you can still pretty easily make out the diagrams of toilet sign-esque person outlines being pointed towards colour-rimmed holes that’ll spit them out somewhere slightly different.
