The HD video quality is really bad

When I'm downloading a HD version of a video, I'm expecting everything to be pristine clear.

Not this compression madness!

Is Giant Bomb now using a way lower bitrate?

The terrible HD quality has been going for a while now, I'm surprised no one has complained.

I have not watched videos on the site for like 3 months, the new video player really blows, it has terrible video quality, and frame rate.

The GB video player is awful. HTML 5 one tends to look a little better but it's buggy as hell.

Our bitrate hasn't changed at all (in fact it's higher then before) so if you did a direct download you should not be seeing compression artifacts unless the encode was bad. I'll check w/ the video team.

The filesize of the "HD" video downloads can be really huge and the quality can be pretty good, but the "High" downloads looks absolutely terrible by comparison.

If you compare the two you'll see that there is a huge amount of detail lost in the High version, as well as a lot of blocking. I know that they have less than half the bitrate of the HD videos but I feel like it's not a very good compromise for people with bandwidth caps like myself. I don't know the specifics of the Giant Bomb video pipeline, but it seems like an additional pass could be added to each video to get rid of some of the blockiness.

GB High has always been 1800 bitrate, we simply bumped HD up. I'll check w/ the encoding team to see if something changed there.

First world problems.

The streaming option only gives me auto. It switches wildly between HD and lower quality, which is a bit annoying.