[Amazon Fire TV + Android TV] The Giant Bomb Enthusiast App

Wow! Super cool what you've done here. Ticks all of my boxes (except the "infinite" one - but sounds like you might be working on that?). Hoping to check out the live E3 shows tonight on my TV vs Surface Pro (icky).

Really do appreciate your hard work on this. Just another reason why GB is the best video games related site/community on the internet. Much love to you guys!

awesome news about gb infinite, thanks for the hard work!

Hey there! I’m new to Giant Bomb and just signed up for the premium subscription. One of the first things I did was download the app for my Fire TV devices at home. Got my main one working in the living room and now that I installed on the device in my bedroom every time I try and start a video, on either device now, I get an error video saying my credentials couldn’t be verified or I may be attempting something “sinister.” Lol. I have a Fire TV device in every room with a tv in this house and would like the app to work on all of them. Is there a limit for the amount of devices my subscription can be on? Or is there a way I can verify that these are all me, in the same home? Now I can’t get anything to work unless it’s on my phone.

My mibox updated to Oreo today and gb enthusiast is asking to relink premium account however everytime it says there is a problem authenticating.

Edit: Clearing apps data/cache fixed it.

@sendo_: Thanks for posting the fix. I was having the same issue too.

Hello,

I am getting the "this is an error video" on premium videos through the app. Free videos like Quick Looks are working. Any suggestions?

I tried clearing cache and app data but no joy...

Works great on the Shield :)

It would be really dope to add Live Channels support to this for the GB Infinite stream.

Any plans on supporting Oreo's channel feature? Would be pretty cool to have the latest videos right on the home screen.

Anyone else experiencing extreme buffering issues the past two weeks or so?

On an Nvidia Shield, hard wired into a gigabit fiber connection, and every minute or two it buffers for 10 seconds or so.

Doesn't matter which GB video I'm watching. Nothing else buffers on the Shield (Netflix/Plex). And GB doesn't buffer on any other device in my home. I've had to take to casting to the Shield from my phone. Very annoying.

I've already tried a full factory reset and reinstall and it didn't help. Ideas?

I can't get any videos to play on this over last two days, both live and archive. Anyone else having problems?

Anyone else having issues with this today ?

All of a sudden it's asking me to relink my account and it's not accepting any code I give it.

Edit: Man I feel like an idiot, I swear I had experienced this before and low and behold I posted in this thread about it along with the solution (clearing app data).

Still getting constant buffering, after 3 months with no solution.

Completely wiped my Shield back to factory twice. I've upgraded my internet connection from 150mbps to gigabit fiber (and speed tests give me a reliable ~800mbps to the Shield). Replaced my router.

But still. Videos will consistently play for a few minutes, but then start to buffer. Maybe 7-8 seconds. And it will then continue to do that every 20-30 seconds. Makes the app unusable. Since this is my primary way of using Giant Bomb, I'm starting to think about cancelling my premium membership after enjoying it for the past 8 years.

Any ideas out there? Is this project being maintained at all? Are there any alternatives in the works for Android TV?

@pythagosaurus: A shame the app isn't working for you, I'm having no trouble with it on my Sony TV. You could try watching through Kodi, which is what I was using before I found this app. The official GB Kodi Add-on is broken and long since abandoned, but there is an unofficial updated version that I think still works:

https://github.com/jimporter/giantbomb-kodi

You'll probably want to download the files directly from the in development "master" branch instead of the packaged releases, since those haven't been updated in several years.

@alecgdouglas I see that you've got a video_progress_sync branch in your repo. How is that going? I can try and help out if it needs more work.

@pythagosaurus: Hey there, really sorry to hear all the trouble you're having getting videos to play in the app. It sounds like you've done all the troubleshooting I could suggest, and since I don't have a Shield to test on myself and it sounds like it's working for most other Shield users, I'm not really sure what else can be done.

It sounds like you should easily be able to stream the highest quality, but out of curiosity, does the same happen even if you select the lowest quality?

Do you have any issues streaming other media on that device?

@odc: I've all but stopped actively developing features for the app. I'm happy to take a look at pull requests and manage releasing updates, but between my newborn and work I just haven't had time to work on this.

Feel free to try finishing out video progress sync - I'm sure there are a lot of users out there that would appreciate that! :)

This just started happening to me in the last two weeks and I am on a Shield TV as well, don't have this issue with any other streaming service/app on there.

@alecgdouglas: My video buffering issues seem to have resolved themselves. I'm in a new house now and I've got the same internet provider (of gigabit fibre op), but a slightly different network configuration. I've only done some limited testing, but it looks like I can watch videos without frequent buffering now.

So I guess it was something on my end?

At any rate, now I'm holding on hope for progress syncing since I tend to watch GB in short spurts on a variety of devices these days.

Anyone having trouble watching video this morning? I keep getting error code 403. Also tried clearing cache and data, but no luck.

@mightyduck: Same problem as you and about the same time period - 403 error. Tried a reset, clear cache, and data as well.

Same problem. Happened in the middle of watching Extra Life videos.

Did anyone ever find a solution to the 403 errors? I have tried everything I can think of on my end but nothing seems to fix it.

I’m having the same problem cannot watch any videos over a year old on the app now

@ste89: Same problem for over a week now as well.

Apologies if this is a stupid question (my web dev experience is very limited) - but I saw Will mention some stuff about the new CDN on UPF and the need for video conversion; any of you more literate app folks know if that kind of back-end change would manifest in this way?

Same, it's a 404 though not 403. For me anyway.

This implies to me that there's something wrong on the backend with finding videos older than a year.

@socaccpsyc: Not sure without knowing how they have things configured in their Kube environments or how their docker containers are built and organized.

It's possible that due to how kubernetes load balances that it's not finding a specific group of videos for some reason.

Ive only been doing this SDN/Cloud stuff for about a year so it's all still pretty new to me.

So this is the issue I have been having the last couple weeks. Since I can't use this app at the moment to watch older videos on my fire tv does anyone have any recommendations for another app to use on my device?

Anyone having issues lately?

I keep getting a player error -

Java net socket timeout exception

My internet seems fine, it's just the video player that's timing out.

@alecgdouglas Hey, thanks for the fantastic app, but I'm having the same issue as several other users here where trying to play videos older than around 6 to 12 months just results in a 404 error. (Recent videos and live streams play just fine.) It seems to affect a bunch of different devices (I'm on a Sony Android TV), and I'm not seeing this problem on other apps like the Video Bomb Android Phone app.

@darkislandcity: I am also having the 404 issue for older videos.

@dejackso besides the 404 issue I also have an issue where the preview picture doesn't show up for a bunch of videos and is instead an X. Anyone in here change to a different app on their firetv/stick?

Same here on the 404. Was there a video encoding change at some point? This was my primary way to enjoy old content so it's a real bummer.

With regards to the missing thumbnails, it seems that's a known more general issue that will hopefully get resolved:

https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bug-reporting-33/thumbnails-on-videos-going-missing-1879594/?page=1#js-message-9088897

I haven't run into 404 issues, but I've also seen a post on that on the bug report forum, so maybe that's a similar general issue

Same issue here that everyone else is having, older videos just give a 404 error and a bunch of thumbnails are missing. I'm guessing they changed something in the API that broke the app.

Same, 404 on Best of GB 115