New Video Player Released!

The new video player has been officially released! (For video on demand only for now, we are still testing it with livestreams).

Thanks to everyone who participated in the beta and helped us solve so many issues! We have a couple outstanding bugs that we've recently discovered and are actively working on. Here they are:

If you have some problems other than the ones mentioned here please post them in the comments below or in the bug reporting thread. Thanks!

Here's a rundown of the features:

Features

Sharing

Keyboard Shortcuts

The left/right arrow shortcuts alone have been beautiful, on top of everything else. Baller engineers!

Here's a weirdly specific issue I've had with this video player - whenever I use the chrome keyboard commands to jump to another tab (command + 1-9) the video player will interpret that as just hitting 1-9 and jump to that part of the video. It's really disorienting and basically makes me paranoid to ever have the video player in focus so I never use the keyboard shortcuts.

I don't know if this affects others (I'm on Chrome on a Mac, if that helps) or if its even an issue on your end but I figured I'd bring it up now.

Oops, didn't realize there was a new thread for the player. I posted a bug roundup on the beta thread here.

Safari for Mac user here. The previous HTML5 player allowed you to right-click to activate macOS Sierra's picture-in-picture mode so I can watch GB videos and do other things at the same time, and allowed for AirPlay. The new one does not appear to support either, in part because the new player has its own right-click menu. Would love to see support for these features just as there is a Google Cast button.

2 things:

1 - Is it possible to have fullscreen on doubleclick disabled when in "Fill Browser" mode. It's really annoying as someone that only uses Fill Browser. Also for the fullscreen button to switch to leave Fill Browser once you are in that mode.

2 - Is it possible to not have the weird 2 tone almost bezel? I really don't think it looks good with the rest of the site.

Otherwise the new player seems to be functioning much better for me! Keep up the great work!

So excited!
Awesome work, techno-duders.

Maybe not a "problem" per say but I'm pretty sure that the old player would remember an individual Embiggen setting between the front page and the video's specific page?

For example the video at the top of the front page would never be "Embiggened" but when I clicked on a link to a video page THAT video would be big?

Maybe I'm completely crazy but I feel like it used to be like that? I always like that since I liked the big video when I'm actually watching it but I also don't want 1/2 of the front page being a huge video player.

Edit:

vvvvv Yay I'm not crazy lol

Two things:

1. The Embiggen setting now also applies to the front page. While this is nice in theory, it means that in order to load up the site without having to scroll to see content I want I have to disable embiggen on the main page's video every time I want to browse and then enable it again whenever I get to a video. It's a small issue, but one that does significantly increase the amount of time that I have to spend fiddling about.
2. The coloration (and overall UI design) of the new player is very different from the rest of the site. A once-over on that would be great.

THANK. FUCKING. GOD.

My number one pet peeve with video players and incidentally the reason that I can't watch any of Austin's new videos over at Waypoint in fullscreen

I'm sorry I just loved full browser. That might have been my favorite thing.

Pinned a video earlier just to see how it worked, and then unpinned it. After hitting the button to refresh the comments, the video became pinned again, even though I didn't hit the button, and the button didn't show as being selected. I had to pin and unpin it again for it to go back to normal.

Thank you so much for Chromecast support!

I'm still having the same issue I had when I tested the Beta. There's like "micro buffering" on every video, where it'll stop and show the buffer animation for literally a split second. On HTML5/Streaming it occurs every minute or two, and kind of randomly when using the Progressive setting. Never had this problem with the previous player.

Win7, latest Chrome w/ an adblocker (though I did try an incognito window without any addons; same deal).

Can I play videos at 1.5x speed? If not then I'm sticking to the YouTube feed.

Cross-posting from the old thread:

I get this bug:

Video not loading when adblock enabled.

In Chrome 55.0.2883.75 on Win 7, with AdBlock disabled. Have whitelisted GiantBomb.com but it doesn't help. I know it's still early in the US so presume this fix hasn't been applied yet, maybe it will sort my issue.

Seems really great regarding playback etc. but what's with the video scrolling on the front page. It makes the website almost unusable.

What sources need to enabled in order for player to work (using noscript)?

It didn't work during the beta, it still doesn't work now. I even whitelisted GB just like you said.

Shortcut for Skip to section is nice, but I think it shouldn't react when holding down ctrl, alt, cmd, or shift, since these are used for other things in the browser.

As an example, changing tabs in Chrome on mac can be done with cmd+number, and when you do that from the tab with the player it skips to that section.

Another Safari user who’s now sorely missing picture-in-picture support the old video player used to have. Just need to be able to right click the video element.

Great job on the new player! It certainly works a lot better than the old one and I'm not constantly running into buffering problems like I used to. So kudo to the team!

There seems to be a memory leak which might be down to the out of date hls.js v0.6.6 which was fixed in later versions.

@picky_bugger: Make sure you don't have the Pin button clicked - white is off/red is on. That will lock the video as visible when scrolling and if it's Embiggened it will cover most of the page.

@egonor: Ah that's it, must have turned it on when messing around with the player. A noble spirit embiggens the smallest videoplayer.

Congrats on finally getting it released.

Forgive me if you're already aware of this, since you have a fix in store for fullscreen video getting cut off in some browsers, but I've been having a related issue with videos being cut off at the bottom when using "fill browser".

Thanks a bunch for the Chromecast support. Finally.

@wcarle: Is it possible to hide the cursor on full-screen mode? Hiding it at the bottom keeps the progress bar on screen.

Agree with both of these. Now the bugs are (mostly) fixed I hope we can see a visual pass to make the player look better.

Good job!

@caramelpolice: @gwil: A work around for now is to load the site in the Helium app. It is a floating video player and you can fill screen.

@caramelpolice said:

Yep, I flagged this in the original bug reporting thread and it wasn't followed up on so I'm not holding my breath. It's a shame, because unless they're doing some really weird JS stuff it would be almost trivial to explicitly support PiP and Airplay using the webkitSetPresentationMode and webkitShowPlaybackTargetPicker functions. Failing that, there's really no good reason to completely disable the context menu — even YouTube allows you to access that by right-clicking twice on the video element.

If you don't want to fire up an external app and you're a premium member, you can also just hit "download" to open a raw .mp4 file; you can then right-click on the video element as before to access PiP and Airplay. This'll progressively download the video, though, so keep that in mind if you're tight on bandwidth.

Every video I play in the new player shows the loading animation over the video the whole time it's playing. Makes the thing kind of unusable. Same thing happened in the beta version. I'm on Safari 10.0.1 (12602.2.14.0.7) on a Mac. I also have uBlock origin installed but as a premium member that shouldn't matter, right?

Edit: Disabled uBlock Origin for GiantBomb and the issue went away.

@conmulligan: Good call. Thanks for the heads up.

Playing videos on chromecast it seems to stutter alot

No chromecast on live videos? (Podcast/ UPF etc.)

Subscriber since day 1. Utterly disappointed at the lack of PiP support in OSX Sierra after mentioning it in the Beta.

Looks like it's not going to be resolved as well?

Not yet, new player isn't out for livestreams yet, look for it either later this week or next!

All we do for chromecast is provide the video file and chromecast is in charge of playing it, if it's stuttering it may be a problem with your chromecast... or with the video encode...

Yeah adblockers can cause some headaches.. we're slowly eliminating these bugs but it so hard to test all the different browser extensions :(

Working on this one, it's just the context menu being hidden. I'll see what I can do

This should be fixed now... *fingers crossed*

I had posted this in the beta stickied thread, but will copy it into here in case this is the new thread to follow --

Stuck with loading video as well Windows 10 Chrome browser (latest version). Tried w/ and w/o uBlock Origin enabled.

edit: tested with Edge as well, same thing.

@anobix: Can you open the error console and take a screenshot? I'm not able to reproduce this at all

@wcarle: Ah, I thought as it wasn't mentioned in the 'known issues' it was a no-go. I will love you forever if this comes back.

The Chromecast support is awesome!

Is there anyway to disable this specific shortcut, either in browser (Chrome) or in the GB player? I often scan through the comments if I'm watching a video I've seen before, then hit Home to get back to the video player, so having it skip to the beginning of the video is rather annoying (it's the main reason I typically avoided the YouTube option on the old player, because it had the same behaviour).

@wcarle: Yeah, it's fixed for me now. You guys are magicians!

The design is still bad. Looks gaudy.

Yeah, Helium was my gateway drug into this picture-in-picture business. It's great, but having it at at system level…

The download method is a nice workaround for now, thanks!

Thank you very much :)

Player works fine for me. I am no design expert but this player looks hideous. It is visually not on par with rest of the page. Please.

I'm having the same problem I had in the beta. Every 10 seconds or so, the video will buffer for a half-second, then skip the video ahead about a second. It makes everything borderline unwatchable.