Steam has 400,000 trailers and Valve had to re-encode all of them for new video player update

Steam's new video player came at a pretty high cost--Valve had to re-encode all of the game trailers that have ever been uploaded to the PC store.

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Valve just surprise launched a nifty update to Steam's video player that makes it much more bandwidth-friendly, which is a big deal if you ever need to watch your data thresholds (Steam, in particular, is known for being a gargantuan data hog on mobile). The video player is also much more functional on non-desktop platforms, including the Steam Deck, devices running Steam Big Picture Mode, and mobiles like Apple's iPhone.

This endeavor took some time, though; according to Valve, the company had to tweak every single game video file uploaded to the Steam library. This amounted to 400,000 files in all, so the next time you hop on Steam and watch some footage, be aware of the effort that went into making it work.

Smarter use of your internet bandwidth

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.

Improved handling of aspect ratio

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...