>>3105Yes. People who first play the game have to encounter the video ingame, it gets sent to Valve, is trancoded to a free format, and then distributed back to users through the "shader caching" option (transcoded videos have been bundled with this option since forever and is a common complaint).
This trancoding at least used to happen on one of the Valve dev's personal computers (source: I saw him post this information personally on Discord).
I can see the domains it connects to when I encounter a video. It can be turned off, or you could use Proton-GE which allows local decoding of nonfree media formats.
I think this whole process requires more than 1 person, or else you'd be able to send them e.g. the entire Shrek movie