So this is something diffferent. I don't know how it flies on these boards, I don't even know why I put this here. Maybe just to vent...
So an hour ago my parents called me, the message was straight forward and not to long:
My grandfather (96) is hospitalized and according to the doctors (heared from other relatives) It is a question of days... if even that. It's the last of my grandparents (never have known the ones from my mothers' side) and I haven't seen him in a year... feels so stupid now.
I don't know the specifics and neither do my parents (on their way to the hospital). Somehow it makes me feel like a heartless jerk. Ofcourse I cried, but I have the feeling that I don't feel enough emotion. I have a history of putting emotions aside as a way of a defense mechanism, but this just feels wrong and pathetic.
What is not making it better... I'm currently not in the country (From the Netherlands, on internship in Hungary) but will go home within 8 days. This feels so long now. Obviously I want to be there, but even I can manage to rebook my flight, it is still the question if it will be in time to see him alive. To make things worse... next week is the last week of my internship. failing next week (with my end evalueation and documentation) will result in failing my internship.
See what I mean... this blog is about me again, not about my grandfather.
Anyways... just do what you want, comment or don't comment. I feel this is a better place to put this than facebook or the like, I can't sense if peoples reactions are genuine or that they respond just because thats the way it is supposed to be.
So as some of you already noticed GB introduced a new videoplayer today, the same one also used on GS. To put it short I am not impressed by it. Now I don't want to sound like a whiney jerk, but I really have some issues with it and I think, that as a paying premium member, I am entitled to have them:
Degraded video quality I already had the minecraft QL open in the old player and compared it with the new player. Image quality is noticablely more pixelated/unsharp. @Szlifier said:
There is something really wrong with scaling. Just like on Gamespot, there is no resampling at all. You surely know how this ruins the image.
Here is a sample(view it unscaled):
No Timebar Making skipping to a specific timestamp harder.
No streaming FIXED On site that regualary posts video's over the 40 minute mark, it is really anoying when you can't skip ahead to (re)watch a particular part of the video. Certainly when you watch in higher quality settings. Now I tested how long it takes to load a 30 minute clip (minecraft) and on a full load of 60 mbit it still takes 2 minutes for 720p. Now that's not that long but I don't think most of the users have speeds above 20 mbit and there are also video's of 2 hours this could extend load time's upto and over 24 minutes (considering 20 mbit / 2hours)
UPDATE: Some users respond that their connection speed is to low to buffer the video, making them pause the video until it gets fully loaded or until their buffer is big enough.
UPDATE 2: Streaming seems to work when auto quality is selected, but that still leaves you with only 360p
No auto quality settings FIXED Video's automaticly start at 360p and stay in it, so if you want to watch video's in higher qualitys, be prepared to do more clicking. Also together with the no streaming issue you'll hear/watch/load the opening of the video twice.
Rather than start a new thread I'll just report my bug here. I played a video from the homepage and muted the ad(as I usually do if it's unskippable). It was a honda civic ad if that helps. When the ad was over the video had no sound. I'm using firefox and I'm on a mac.
@mscupcakes said:
every time I watch a new video it starts playing the Assassin's Creed III trailer instead, I have to refresh each time before it loads the actual video I want to watch.
As said you have torefreshthe pageeverytimewhen you want to watch an older video. FIXED
@Tearhead said:
Yeah, I'm not too happy with it either. Might as well list my complaints here:
Can't double-click to minimize/maximize video
Can't press spacebar to pause, and when I click anywhere on the video to pause I have to click the middle of the screen to un-pause.
Cursor not disappearing with UI (this wasn't in previous versions of the player, but c'mon guys, it's 2012)
@insane_shadowblade85 said:
I've had a problem where the video tells me that it's fully loaded when only a portion of it has loaded. So when I watch a Quick Look the video ends 10 to 20 minutes in.
@Bats said:
I realize my browser (Opera) is in the minority but my issue is regardless of what resolution I choose (within the player itself), the video seems to be in the lowest possible resolution. I never had this issue with the old player. Prior to activating the video, my default is already set to HD, but this is ignored when the video starts. I can't stand low res videos, I crave quality dagnabit. Hope you can fix it soon Dave! =)
@Jrinswand said:
... Here's a new bug: The player will not let me upgrade to 720p under any circumstances. ...
tweets from @enemykite (@snide)
Have a bug with the player dealing with ads on the FD (if you're a non-sub). We're on the case. Also fixing it not saving your display prefs.
We're looking into the streaming not jumping ahead issues as well. That is not intended.
Step 2: Locate the index.html file and replace http://pseudo01.hddn.com/vod/demo.flowplayervod/flowplayer-700.flv with the downloadlink of the video you want to watch
so far it only allows progressive, but I am going to write a script that pulls the video links from the RSS feed and with some googleing trying to add streaming.
UPDATE 5: Response from @alexisg :
Streaming not allowing you to skip ahead.
A sort of fix for this right now is that you can set the player to Auto from within the player. This should stick across all of your video plays if you set it once within this player. The player should auto pick your bitrate for you based on your bandwidth but I do not think that is working just yet. Sam is working on making sure the prefs you set before the player stick and that the UI reflects the options we now have in a better fashion.
Youtube not being available for subs.
This should be fixed. Let us know if this is not true.
As far as the player itself, once things are ironed out it should actually perform better than the flow player. Flowplayer had a lot of issues which I saw on a daily basis such as weird buffering notifications, odd performance problems and overall clunky controls. Obviously this is all subjective but we are still using the same videos as we were before. We are simply using a different player. I tried playing the videos side by side natively vs the gamespot player and I didn't see a difference. But some of you are seeing differences in the way it handles full screen and I'll go back into the examples provided and give a better response.
Apologies for the troubles. Video is obviously one of the most important parts of Giant Bomb so these issues are annoying to say the least. The other issues which Dave mentioned here are being worked on as well. We'll get it right as soon as we can. -Alexis
In regards to the super long videos not playing correctly.
I believe this used to happen with flow player as well in Firefox. There seems to be a 2GB limit in Firefox with both players. That Arma2 file is over 2.3 GB from our servers. It plays fine on Youtube because well its Youtube. My guess is that well they are able to get around that by how they stream the video file to you. They obviously can stream just about anything (search for 5 hour long video of Adriana Lima for example). I'll ping the GS engineers and see if they know of a workaround or maybe talk with Vinny to figure out a better solution. Hopefully FF adopts mp4 support (which they said they will) soon so we can simply give you guys the HTML5 player.
As for the fullscreen aliasing for the youtube player
This also seems to be affecting Firefox. Seems to be fine in Chrome/Safari. We'll look into it. I don't think we are doing much other than simply using the normal iframe embed. This might actually be the issue as the old style of embedding videos was with the embed tag.
This is my first blogpost (and innevitably my first completed quest-set).
I am a 22 year old guy from the Netherlands and have been a gamer since... well I was old enough to hold a Commodore Amiga joystick (Galaga Deluxe brings back some good memories, even as Putty that will see a new release after 17 years). Also I have played on what many of you call 'the worst console of all time' the Philips CD-I and the way I look at it, is like a guilty pleasure, it had bad controls but had some funny titles or even some stunning graphics (lost-eden for instance). Futhermore I have played on the PC for some years, mostly three games, Unreal Tournament, Rollercoaster Tycoon and Dungeon Keeper. Than a had some years I grew out of gaming, picking it up since three years with my PS3 which is my only console besides my PSP that dusting away.
I'll blog about the games I want, play and get on an irregular basis. I know myself all to well and it's probably going to stay at three or four blogpost's but I will promise that I will try to make more.
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