ussbutte

Given that most of the art assets in Lex Mortis are lifted from a CryEngine tech demo, I'd say that Drew and Dan were, if anything, too lenient on the game. I'm pretty sure at least CDF Ghostship had original art assets. (To be fair, I'm not sure what the licensing is on the CryEngine demo assets, so I'm not accusing the Lex Mortis dev of violating licensing agreements, but still. At least try to have some original art.)

For example:

References:

http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/cryengine-3-sdk/cryengine-3-sdk-02-navigation-interface-viewports.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGV1-59DS2s#t=5m20s

If you use the API to get all videos, and then sort them by the publish date, the results are subtly different from usual: the image URLs are relative paths, and the HD video link uses https (it's usually http). For example: http://hastebin.com/opuhiwuvul.json

Woo! I tried it out, and everything's good now!

Firefox has supported playing H.264 video in HTML5 for around a year now, although I guess that doesn't help for streams. (I think?)

@laika: If you open the Giant Bomb add-on and hit "C", you should get a menu that includes "Add-on settings" at the bottom. Hit that, and it'll show a dialog with a quality selector. "Auto" means "try to get HD if the API returns an hd_url". You can verify that you're getting an HD video by hitting "I" (the letter eye) and checking if the path for the video starts with "http://www.giantbomb.com/api/protected_video/".

I can access subscriber content without issues if I set the quality to "High" (I tested with the May 23 Unprofessional Friday).

But that's not the important part. The important part is that I figured out what's happening. I finally decided to just open up Wireshark and watch the HTTP traffic. The request from XBMC for the HD video link (http://www.giantbomb.com/api/protected_video/2300-8925/?download=1&api_key=<MY_API_KEY>) gets a 403 Forbidden response. I narrowed it down to the User-Agent string that my version of XBMC supplies. After deleting bits of it until I found the smallest substring that still fails, I got "a6". It seems that A6 is a web spider for some ad platform or something. I'm guessing whatever the protected_video URLs go through is trying to ban that spider, but the ban is a little broader than it ought to be.

There are, I suppose, two solutions: either make the User-Agent ban a bit more specific, or have the Giant Bomb add-on specify a custom User-Agent. You can do this by appending the string "|User-Agent=Whatever" to URL for the video. XBMC will parse that out and use "Whatever" as the User-Agent when making the HTTP request.

EDIT: Oh, and the "a6" in my User-Agent comes from the Git commit ID for the version of XBMC I'm on.

Here's the relevant part of the log (from XBMC 12, but it seems to happen on 13 as well): http://pastebin.com/vm631MFw

It looks like XBMC is having troubles getting the file to load. If I paste the link into a web browser, it works fine though (after redirecting to the actual video URL). If I had to make a totally-uneducated guess, maybe the MIME type of the initial link is bad, and that's confusing XBMC?

EDIT: Yeah, running `curl -I <video_url>` shows that the Content-Type is text/html, which might be an issue.

If you have the quality in the settings set to "Auto" (and you've logged in), it tries to grab the HD versions of the videos. I think it's "hd_url" from the JSON. As far as I can tell, the difference is that the HD version requires your API key and redirects to the video, whereas the other resolutions just have a direct link to the .mp4 file.

It seems like this still isn't working for HD-quality videos...

Even though I haven't played for ages, I used to fly in Goonswarm, and I'm a little sad that the most notable thing about GSF is that they spam local chat, and not, say, Burn Jita or Hulkageddon. Goonswarm definitely has some of the craziest assholes in the world in it, but even the Mittani stopped when the Red Alliance asked for help to track down where an enemy Titan* pilot lived in real life so they could cut the power to his house in order to blow up the Titan in-game.

Oh, and I'm glad @patrickklepek and I agree that Iceland is great. It's pretty much the best country.

* The most powerful ship class in the game, and basically unkillable at the time.

Firefox 20 added support for H.264 video on Windows, so I thought I'd try it out (toggle media.windows-media-foundation.enabled in about:config). However, when using the HTML5 video player with Firefox, the letterboxing doesn't work right, as seen in the image to the right.

On a related note, clicking the big red play button didn't start the video either. It loaded the video, but then I had to click the little play button to actually play it.

Both of these things work in the Youtube HTML5 player, so I'm assuming this isn't a Firefox bug (or if it is, it can be worked around).

EDIT: I just noticed that the FAQ says this isn't supported for Firefox Beta. Even though this is no longer a beta feature, it is preffed-off, so maybe that still counts as "beta" in some way? If so, disregard this.