Buffering Issues with Video Player

This issue still persists and is making the site unusable without a vpn. Here is the speed test without the vpn.

ID: 9T5D7M

Date: Wed Nov 22 21:58:08 2017

Client Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2017 21:58:12 GMT

DNS IP: 74.125.47.132 (BE) (AS15169 Google Inc.)

Edge IP: 2.21.69.18 2.21.69.14 (GR) (AS20940 Akamai International B.V.)

Client IP: XXXXXXXX (TR) (AS12735 TurkNet Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S)

Protocol: HTTP/1.1

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0

Cookies: yes

Latency: 122ms

Speed: 252kbps

And here it is with a US vpn.

ID: 3X8X4D

Date: Wed Nov 22 22:08:46 2017

DNS IP: 74.125.113.133 (US) (AS15169 Google Inc.)

Client IP: XXXXXXXXXX (US) (AS20473 Choopa, LLC)

Protocol: HTTP/1.1

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0

Cookies: yes

Edge IP: 104.91.166.83 104.91.166.79

Latency: 193ms

Speed: 617kbps

ID: 5U3D4S

Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2018 19:40:10 UTC

DNS IP: 72.251.251.45 (NL) (AS29791 Voxel Dot Net, Inc.)

Client IP: 83.59.217.86 (ES) (AS3352 Telefonica De Espana)

Protocol: HTTP/1.1

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.186 Safari/537.36

Cookies: yes

Edge IP: 88.221.144.11 88.221.144.7

Latency: 48ms

Speed: 33.6Mbps

I don't know how to be slick and pull all the info y'all are, but I'm on Chrome get 75Mbps down 10Mbps up on ethernet with uverse and see consistent buffering issues lately, it's a bummer!

I know this is a dead thread, but fwiw, I had cancelled my years-long premium subscription months ago specifically, and only, because of the video player issues after exhausting hours and then days trying to troubleshoot it. Watching content on the site tonight, and it's still pretty awful.

@rorie I want to chime in too. I've had ongoing buffering issues for months, especially new videos within a few hours of posting, on both pc browsers and the Apple TV app. Perhaps the CDN has a problem and they're just not differentiating between new videos that haven't propagated fully and old videos that have had time to propagate when they're reporting average user download speeds.

Still happening to me too. Trying to watch the Unprofessional Fridays archive for 3/16/2018 and made it up to the start of the X-men segment, about 42 minutes in and the buffering issues began. All other aspects of my connection are fine, only GB content.

I just counted 46 seconds of buffering and then it played for 10 seconds before stopping to buffer again. That ain't good.

@rorie Still having this issue for the better part of a year. Where do we go to find out if this is being worked? It’s a big problem!

This is happening for me too. On some days it works flawlessly but a lot of the time it is actually unusable. I am on a pretty tight budget, so it would be really nice if I did not have to pay for something that only works sporadically. I absolutely love GB but this is getting frustrating. If me providing more information regarding my connection and devices will help, let me know.

Trying to catch up The Exquisite Corps, starting with videos from January and it seems every other video is a forever buffering sad factory.

Also getting lots of buffering issues on Chrome, with Progressive and HTML5.

@rorie@wcarle

I can watch the live stream perfectly. However, any VOD I get buffering issues. Each VOD typically runs fine for 30-40 min. Once it starts buffering it seemingly never stops.

Downloading the VOD is equally as slow. I'm getting speeds bouncing between 20 KB/s to 1000 KB/s.

Comcast in Denver, CO. Same issues at two different apartments. This has been an issue for as long as this thread.

Hope this helps.

ID: 5E6E7B

Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2018 02:11:39 UTC

DNS IP: 76.96.47.195 (US) (AS33652 Comcast Cable Communications, LLC)

Client IP: (US) (AS33652 Comcast Cable Communications, LLC)

Protocol: HTTP/1.1

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36

Cookies: yes

Edge IP: 184.25.204.137 184.25.204.133

Latency: 13ms

Speed: 150.9Mbps

This is still being looked into but it involves a couple of big aspects that will take some time to resolve. Ultimately I believe the plan is to get our content hopefully onto multiple different CDNs, but that will require some business stuff and apparently all of the videos on the site are going to have to be reprocessed, both of which are going to take some time. Apologies for the lack of concrete news, but all I can really say is that the engineers are looking into it. I don't have a firm ETA on when this stuff might get done, unfortunately.

For the last week this has been an issue for me as well.

Prior to this past week I had no issues whatsoever, now I can't watch more than a minute straight of video without it buffering.

This occurs for me both at home and at my office, using different ISPs. Network configurations have not changed within the time period that this started.

If I watch Giant Bomb videos on YouTube directly, I have no issues at all.

@rorie

I don't know if this is helpful, but my network traffic seems to hit two different cbsig.net domains (reth0-1205.fw3.phx2.cbsig.net and irb-1214.spine4.phx2.cbsig.net) before resolving to giantbomb-www-vip1.phx2.cbsig.net

I can provide something like a Fiddler capture or other information if that is helpful.

+1 to all this. And the Roku app was just fixed, too and now we can barely watch again. The buffering is pretty brutal.

Ah, ok, this might be the issue I'm experiencing. And here I was thinking it was me. It might still be me, of course, but well... youtube and other sites seem to work just fine. I'll just sit this out and see what happens. This sucks, though. Now I have to go back to actually playing video games instead of watching people play them. ;-P

After weeks of no issues with buffering, it's back with a vengeance this week. Can't watch more than about 90 seconds before it has to stop.

If I go directly to YouTube and watch the video there, I have no problems at all.

@glockjaw: Any videos in particular that are worse than others? Are westcoast livestreams worse than east coast?

I actually have no problems with live streams. I noticed it was back when I watched the most recent Premium version of Bombcast. I haven't watched any other videos since I noticed buffering was happening again. Let me try a couple of other videos on the site and I'll report back.

EDIT: I should add, I don't specifically remember any issues with a live stream. I haven't watched a live stream since I noticed the issue was occurring again.

@rorie Here's what I found.

I watched 10 minutes of the Mailbag video, and Jeff's Home Game video. I also watched a couple minutes of the non-premium Bombcase video. I didn't have any problems with those.

I watched This is For Fun, Exquisite Corps, and the premium Bombcast video and couldn't make it more than about 45 seconds before the video would buffer. It would then play for a bit, then go back to buffering, and just repeat that cycle.

I didn't watch them in the order I listed above but mixed them around. It seems I've found that if I watch a Premium video I get the buffering issue, whether it's posted by East or West, and if I watch a non-premium video I have no issues at all.

I also continue to have this problem. Sad state of affairs.

I sadly have the same issues. Particularly during 6pm-1am, PT. This is not dependent upon OS, browser, device, or ISP. I have a solid 150mpbs downlink via Crapcast. Over wifi that drops to roughly 100mbps over my network. I could be across the country on a tablet/pc/device, on another ISP (eg. Georgia/century link) and still have issues.

This is not a glowing advertisement for Akamai. I don't know what CBS has on its project plan, but hey, maybe consider AWS - I never have a problem streaming with them.

I don't intend to kick dust, but being a GB premium member and having crap streaming reliability is bothersome. I pay for GB, Netflix, and Amazon - only. I have a reliability issue with just one, unfortunately. I also want to respect the GB folks (Rorie, Engs/Support) that have been looking into this, I understand it's not simple. But hey, the people have to voice their opinions.

I've heard continued talk of blaming Akamai/CDN's, "we're looking into it", but your customers are suffering due to this. Who is the rep for Akamai you're dealing with? Your customer base has been speaking about this for months, if not years. Step it up GB! We love you guys, make sure we can watch what you present!

Fix this, please.

PS I understand this is truly a first world problem...

- Mookal

+1 to all this. Happening consistently enough again that I'm actually posting about it this time around. I know it's being worked on, but I figured I'd rather say something instead of just whining to myself :)

Just want to say I am also still having this issue and I am sure its super well known at this point. Buffers constantly through any video.

So I've been getting this issue off and on for the past year or so on both progressive and html. Even the video downloads sometimes stall out and I just have to shrug and try to watch/download again on another day. I don't really have issues with any other streaming services - Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, etc.

I've disabled all my Chrome extensions when I'm on Giant Bomb and reset some modem stuff, but other than that, I'm not too sure what else to do on my end. Hope it gets resolved soon because it's been a huge bummer having to deal with the buffering issues while watching premium content. I just want The Bomb!

@rorie I have been having issues for roughly a year now. I just ran a speed test on speedtest.net, xfinity, and windstream. All of them came back at 40Mbs. I used to watch all of my videos on Progressive HD. The only way to watch videos is in HTML5 Auto, but it never sticks with HD, but moves off and on HD. Selecting HTML5 HD manually results in the same buffering issues. As a paying member, its frustrating when I cannot watch the videos and quality levels I am paying for. If money is the issue, raise your membership fees. I will pay $60-$70 a year for premium content.

@madbootsy: @joey2683: here's what I said in another thread, sorry if it's not in this one:

Apologies if there haven't been many updates on the buffering issues if you've been experiencing those lately. The long-term intent here is to stop using Akamai exclusively for video hosting and allow your browser or devices to switch to a more accessible or better-performing CDN if it develops issues while streaming a video. This work is still underway but unfortunately it's fairly complicated and also isn't something that we can do 100% on our own, engineering-wise; it requires resources from elsewhere in CBS that we can't necessarily task at will. Regardless, it's definitely something that's still on our radar even if I can't give a firm timeline right now on when this all will be implemented. Sorry for the troubles!