Steam has a razzle-dazzle new video player that's actually usable, but press F for the unlucky Valve employees who had to re-encode all 400,000+ trailers on the platform

(Image credit: Valve)

If you're anything like me, Steam's trailer function has been—for its entire lifespan—pretty much useless. Maybe I'm just cursed, but in my experience the player is laggy, impossible to scrub through, and prone to random hitches and quality issues. It means the trailer is just something of which I see about 0.5 seconds before I click off of it and onto a game's screenshots.

But no more. As of yesterday, Steam's trailer player has gotten a new lick of paint and seems actually useful now. In a post on the Steam news blog, Valve announced that someone had wheeled their desk over to the right section of the office long enough to overhaul the whole thing. They even re-encoded literally every trailer on Steam to do it—over 400,000 files.

The player now has a new interface, an adaptable UI that should work on whichever screen you do your trailer-viewing on (Valve says excitedly, "It even works well on iPhones now"), and "fewer pauses and hitches when jumping forward or backward in a video," which was my key bugbear with ye olde player. "You will also see seamless transitions when pressing that full-screen button," says Valve.

If you're wondering what the benefits are of Valve re-encoding every video it could get its hands on for this upgrade (running a Plex server is just like running Valve, apparently), one of the new features is "smarter use of your internet bandwidth."

In essence, game trailers should now swap between 360p, 480p, 720p, and 1080p depending on what you can fit in your internet pipes, which I think finally puts it on par with YouTube 20 years ago.

The bad news is, some of the games—and trailers—on Steam are real old. That means they're only available in low-res and look more than a little crusty in the modern era.

"Some trailers were uploaded a long time ago and we no longer have the original files within the Steam system," says Valve. "Yes, we're still trying to find our stash of tape backups so we can get the originals of the Portal trailer."

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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