If you tried to download a video or play a video on your phone, tablet or set top box and got an error video instead there's a few possible reasons for that.
- You're downloading from a valid link but
- You're not logged in to Giant Bomb
- The video is premium and
- Your subscription expired
- You never had a subscription
- You're using an app on your phone/tablet/set top box and
- You haven't linked your Giant Bomb account
- The developer no longer supports it
- You haven't updated it
- We've never heard of this app and the developer never told us about it
- You're using a generic app that uses our RSS feed to get the videos
- You're running a homebrew script that needs some tweaking
- You're using iTunes
- You're using a downloader like jDownloader that mangles the video links
- You're on a LG Android device and are using the default media player
- You're running a browser on something that isn't a desktop, laptop, phone or tablet (e.g. Playstation, XBox, etc.) and you've chosen a video quality other than Auto.
- You're on an older Android device that doesn't support HLS
- There's a use case our developers didn't think about
If its 1, Log in to your premium account or why not renew or subscribe?
If its 2, If you're using Video Buddy you will need to Log In and link your Giant Bomb account before you can watch any video. If you're using some other app and are having problems please let us know which app that might be. Definitely make sure you have the latest version of the app. You might also checkout these apps
Giant Bomb Video Buddy Android or iOS
Giant Bomb Apple TV App
If its 3 or 4, You're going to need to append your API key to the video url or the RSS feed like this:
http://v.giantbomb.com/video.mp4?api_key=aaabbb111
http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/feed/hd/?api_key=aaabbb111
For some (many) podcast apps you will need to add your userid/password too and use https.
https://user:pass@www.giantbomb.com/videos/feed/mobile/?api_key=aaabbb111
We're going to look into changing this so the user and password aren't necessary
Don't have an api key? Click Here
Please note, you'll be limited to 20 unique video downloads a day downloaded this way.
Also if you're using wget/curl in your homebrew script you will need to provide a unique user agent. wget/curl requests with empty or default user agents are blocked at the firewall.
If its 5, iTunes is being stupid (shocker) and considering urls that don't end in .mp4 to be valid
If its 6, It seems jDownloader and other downloaders are not including the api_key parameter in the URL. This is now a required thing and cannot be changed. All off-site video downloads require some kind of authentication. If the downloader can't or won't append the api_key parameter there's nothing we can do to support it. This sucks, yes. We're sorry.
GiantBomb User @smek seems to have found a solution for jDownloader.
If its 7, The default media player on most LG devices has a nasty bug in it that causes us (and other video/podcast producers) major headaches. We are specifically blocking that player. Its something we hate to do but the damage it does to us lead us to taking this action. Getting in contact with a huge Chinese hardware manufacturer to discuss this issue is impossible.
Good old VLC player works like a charm.
If its 8, This is our problem, we should never have given you those options on those devices because now they just won't work and before they worked for you but were bad for us. We'll remove those options on those devices so there's no more confusion.
If its 9, We're sorry. Some Android devices can no longer play our videos at all. This would be any device that doesn't support HLS. For the most part any Android before 3.0 will not support HLS and some very low end devices cannot either. Android 4.0 isn't very good with HLS either. We have to drop support for those devices.
If its 10, Sorry! No one's perfect. Let us know about it and please also include some info about the video and where you're trying to watch from.
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