A quick update on Encoder/Video issues.

Hey all, I wanted to update you all on some video encoder stuff. If you haven’t been keeping up, our video encoder has been having some issues where it would not spit out all possible resolutions of each file we uploaded, resulting in some videos only getting Low and MOB settings or HD and Medium or sometimes all of them! It took us a while to figure out the issue but we rolled out a fix today. You should see all possible download options for each video (retroactively, too) in the download menu for each video on the website. This SHOULD (I think) apply to the RSS feeds as well.

Unfortunately another issue seems to persist: the download options on the page have a 4K resolution file but no 1080p file in them. (The HD version of the All Videos RSS feed appears to have the correct 1080p files for recent videos, so that’s something else I have to figure out here. Also the list of quality settings on the RSS feed are different than the listings in the download menu which is probably causing some other issues somewhere. What a mess!)

I suspect that some of the issues with set top boxes and apps is that this 4k video file is choking apps that don’t support that kind of resolution, but I’d love to hear if anyone with a Roku or Apple TV that’s been having issues has any improvement after today’s change rolls out. We will be looking to remove the 4K versions of videos from our feeds and download options regardless (since we don’t record in 4K at the moment), but in the meantime, please let me know if you’ve been having issues with Roku or Apple TV or anything else and see any differences in performance after today, for better or worse. If you can, see if you can adjust the default quality settings for videos and see if that affects your ability to play back videos or help with stuttering, etc.

Thanks for all your patience through all of this; it's been a heck of a time for video snafus around here but hopefully we're close to a real resolution for everything.

Oh and I forgot to mention but the issues with adblock and the site player should be resolved as well, but let me know if you're still running into them.

I'm using Giant Bomb Enthusiast on Android TV and it looks like the newest "Giant Bomb Animated" (Coke Discourse) seems fixed, but the old ones don't show any playback options. Most of the other shows that I noticed this issue on recently seem fixed (the Playdate Playdate for instance.) I'll try clearing the settings as maybe the bad data is just cached.

Looking at the site, Animated - "The Lifeguard" has only Low and Mobile options and for whatever reason, that comes up with no playback options in GBE/Android TV. Maybe it's a different issue, but something to look at maybe.

Same here with a Chromecast with TV (still an Android TV) using the Enthusiast app. Weirdly getting low quality only options for Jan's Resident Evil Movie Story and Up in my Frunk, but the other older animated have no options for me either.

This is how GBE translates the available options it seems:

So this might be an issue with the app miscategorizing and not displaying the "Low" Option. I guess the question then is if the site is meant to only have the "Low" option available for those videos.

The file sizes for animated are pretty low so this may be working as intended. Maybe I'll see if the artist can export bigger files for us going forward.

I find that the official Apple TV app doesn’t really work too well at this point. Videos just seem to buffer endlessly.

GBFan works pretty well, on one of my Apple TVs I have buffering issues for whatever reason.

Video Bomb on Android was not playing any premium content. It appears to be fully working again based on my limited testing.

Edit: Mobile quality does not work.

Hey Rorie, I’ll follow up on Friday after seeing if UPF is still affected (since its the main show using the specific player) but has there been any investigation into why streams using the premium (ie non-twitch) player are buffering and dropping connection constantly on webkit browsers for the last month? I mentioned this to you in chat once and there’s been a few reports scattered in the forums and elsewhere, but yeah - after loading the video it will most likely start a loop of buffering badly or dropping connection after ~10 seconds to a minute, and the only option is to refresh the page.

This seems to affect any iOS devices using safari/WebKit (ie. my iPad, iPhone), I tried installing the chrome app but as this is also WebKit-based in iOS the problem persists.

I think its likely the same root problem of this too:

I’ve yet to test on a Mac.

There is a ticket open on this and it looks like one of our engineers has a lead. It's most likely going to have to be sent to our central video support team, though; I'll try to find the mechanism to do that today. I don't have an ETA for a fix, unfortunately, but it's being investigated!

@rorie is any of this the reason why I haven't been able to properly cast "low" quality videos via the VideoBomb android app?

It's been perfect up until last week, when it started stuttering even on low (my chromecast doesn't even try to cast high or HD videos) and so I've had to use other means to watch the latest bunch of videos.

Hi @rorie I am used to watching Giant Bomb exclusively through the Apple TV app, and there are still playback problems as of today.

For context:

• I have both an Apple TV HD (4th gen) and an Apple TV 4k (5th gen, without the Bionic chip). I don't have the latest Apple TV 4K (6th gen, with the Bionic chip) released last year. All the issues I've experienced happen on both Apple TVs I have.
• In the Giant Bomb app, I can only select from three different choices for Video Quality: HD, High, and Low. There is no Medium, Mobile, or 4k option.

These are the issues I'm still experiencing:

• If I set quality to "Low" or "High": no video plays in the latest feed or in the Series feeds. When I select a video, I just get a spinning indicator.
• If I set the quality to "HD": the video for UPF, the Bombcast, and Voicemail Dump Truck all start stuttering after a few seconds (as if the encoding is too high). The audio for those videos continue to play fine. For all other series, video and audio playback work as normal.