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.
• No YouTube player
  FIXED

Other reported issues:

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.

Service announcement from @snide

Hey guys, we're looking into the following on the new player. As usual, we're listening and should have this stuff fixed quickly.

• Streaming not allowing you to skip ahead.
• Video player having trouble on the front page.
• Key commands not registering.
• Preferences (high, med, low) not sticking.
• Youtube not being available for subs.
• Ads showing on short form stuff like trailers.
• AJAX url builders someotimes not loading a new video when clicked for subscribers.

So I have a way to get the video's playing in flowplayer again:

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

Step 1: Download the free Flowplayer

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.

What are your opinions?