Giant Bomb Video FAQ

AdBlock, ADBLOCK, AdBlock+

Do you have AdBlock turned on? This will almost guarantee that our videos will not play. Sorry. Some of our videos are over 4GB in size and over 2 hours long. Ads make these things possible. If you are a paid subscriber you should be able to simply whitelist GiantBomb as a site that allows ads. We won't be sending you ads anyhow. We thank you for your support.

Steam

If you have steam running and are currently downloading a game just don't even bother trying to download anything on the internet. Steam will soak up as much bandwidth as you have available. You can however set a limit from within the Steam preferences which should make things better.

How fast of a connection do I need to watch HD video on Giant Bomb?

These values are approximation based on the following formula:

(videobitrate * 1.5) / 1024 = Mbits

As a general rule of thumb you need 1.5x the the internet connection speed of the bit rate of the videos to account for isp connection lag, server processing and a whole mess of other random internet slowdown (cat gifs).

Progressive, streaming, HTML5 features?

*The Streaming player automatically chooses the bit-rate based on available bandwidth and CPU. If the player detects too many dropped frames or buffering it will automatically choose a lower quality bitrate.

Users with very slow connections may want to use the progressive or HTML5 players as it allows the video to buffer while paused.

All players stream video using mp4 h264 video.

Sticky Function?

The sticky option allows the player to scroll down with the page as you read. The homepage and video hubs both keep this as a separate user preference, which means you can use the sticky option only on the homepage or vice versa.

Embiggen??

The embiggen will stretch the player out to a max size of 1280x720 based on available window space in your browser.

Youtube and why is it a member only feature?

Members also have the option to use the youtube player for our original content. This is a member only feature since we can't display preroll ads on Youtube. Trailers (which would be marked as duplicate content) and locked premium videos are not available on Youtube.

Videos won't stay in fullscreen mode when using multiple monitors

We've switched to using the browser's native fullscreen capability, as opposed to Flash fullscreen, so the behavior is browser dependent. When you go work on a separate document some browsers assume you want to be out of fullscreen mode. Flash handled fullscreen a bit better, but unfortunately we all see where Flash is headed, so we're trying use as much native browser capabilities as possible.

What known issues are there with the video player?

• AdBlock will most certainly kill the video player.
• We do not support nightly/dev builds of browsers as they are in a constant state of development.
• Windows Phone is currently not supported but is being worked on.
• Windows Surface fullscreen and video controls are non responsive. Although we use a standard <video> tag and the built-in player on the Surface there are some issues which we are still working on.
• Firefox Beta HTML5/H264 is not supported. The HTML5 H264 support in Firefox is rapidly changing and is currently Windows only. As it gets closer to release candidate we will devote more time to it.
• iOS is not removing the red play button as quickly as it should and in general startup of these videos can seemingly lag. This has more to do with iOS pre-buffering the video before it auto plays it but we are looking into it.
• The 250k/s video stream is currently not available on mobile devices. This will be added soon.
• Safari 6.0.3 Fullscreen is having some serious issues. Something changed in 6.0.3 which is not present in the nightly webkit builds. 6.0.4 will most likely fix it but we are looking into it anyhow.

I am still having problems!!

Search the bug reporting forums to see if others have already reported the particular issue you are having.

1. If you believe you have more than enough bandwidth to view these videos you can help us out by doing the following.

• Visit speedtest.net Run the test against a US location. Once done click on "share this result". Copy the link to the png created.
• Run a traceroute to cp198953.edgefcs.net and v.giantbomb.com
• Send a PM to @mrpibb with this info.

On Windows: open command prompt and type "tracert cp198953.edgefcs.net" without the quotes. To copy the text right click at the top of the command prompt> edit> mark> select the text> right click at the top of the command prompt> edit> copy. Repeat with "tracert v.giantbomb.com"

Mac/Linux: Open terminal and run "traceroute cp198953.edgefcs.net" without the quotes. Copy those results. Repeat with "traceroute v.giantbomb.com".

2. If you have an issue which you can't find in the forums, create a new thread in the bug forums.

-Staff