[Android App] Giant Bomb Video Buddy

Do you like Giant Bomb's one-of-a-kind video content? Do you own an Android phone or tablet running 2.2 (Froyo) or better? If you answered "yes" to both of those questions then I might have something of interest to you: Giant Bomb Video Buddy!

What is it?

Giant Bomb Video Buddy is an app designed to make it easy to watch Giant Bomb's videos when and where you want. It does that by letting everyone:

• Stream all non-member-exclusive videos
• Save your place in a video and resume from that spot later

Additionally, premium members can:

• Access subscriber-only videos
• Access HD streams for every video
• Download videos to watch later

What does it look like?

Gallery

Gallery

Where can I get it?

You can find Giant Bomb Video Buddy in the Google Play Store. If your device doesn't have access to the Play Store I also make the APK available for you to sideload:

• Android 4.0.2 and earlier [v1.0.13 - June 18, 2014]
• Android 4.0.3 and newer [v2.0.13 - January 3, 2016]

Related Projects

• Giant Bomb Video Buddy for iOS
• Whiskey Media Video Buddy for Android

If you have any questions or comments please don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Intriguing!

I've been using the original app for over a year now (android), and it works great.

A+++ developer, would code again.

Thanks for the update!

This needs to be featured on the Community Board. :)

Oh man oh man oh man. It's everything that I always wanted. Thanks.

yes its a good app had it for a while now

Hey, you implemented the new DrawerLayout! Nice. :)

Clean and fast. An expanded search feature would make it perfect. Nice work.

I still use the shit out of the Whiskey Media Video Buddy. Thanks for making this too! Keep up the awesome work.

Just installed the new Giant Bomb Video Buddy. As a long time fan of the Whiskey version, I just had to stop by and let you know that the new app seems great. I look forward to using it just as much as I did the Whiskey one.

You probably can't make a paid version of this for legal reasons, but you deserve mysterious donations that aren't at all related to Giant Bomb or any of their content. You should let us know if that's possible.

Edit: Nevermind regarding the above paragraph! I found the "DLC" menu. I'll be leaving more positive feedback on the Google Play Store as well.

Thank you, better than that other giant bomb app.

This is sick, you my friend are the BEST!!!!

5 Janky ass halfway Trenched salutes / 5

Wow, thanks for posting the APK for Kindle Fire owners. Looks great!

Thanks for this :) Will use it on my Android Smart TV box

Awesome, big fan of your wm video buddy.

Thanks a ton, my mornings lying half asleep on my bed watching my phone have been greatly enhanced by your app.

soup_menu, this app is awesome. I used the hell out of the Whiskey Media Video Buddy, and this seems like an improvement on all fronts.

Quick question, though. That app had an option to set the location that downloaded videos were stored. I have a Galaxy Note 2, which can take a microSD card but won't allow apps to install to it. With the Whiskey Media app, I could just throw all downloaded videos onto that card. Any chance of that option coming back to this iteration?

@defordj: The app should be set up to store files to an SD card if one's available. If you have a file browser (I like ES File Explorer, myself), try downloading a video and then looking in <SD Card Root>/Android/data/com.giantbomb.unofficial.gbvb.android/files/videos/. If you can find the video file in there then you're all set. If not, let me know and I'd be happy to look into it.

I also want to thank all of you guys for your support. You're awesome!

@soup_menu: I see com.giantbomb.unofficial.gbvb under /sdcard. Videos download there fine. Unfortunately on this stupid phone, [device]/sdcard isn't an actual SD card; it's the phone's internal memory. The SD card is [device]/storage/extSdCard. Which has its own /Android/data subdirectory.

If there's no fix, I totally understand. It's a weird use case. Just figured I'd ask.

An Unfortunate Update

I've just received a notice from Google informing me that Giant Bomb Video Buddy has been removed from the store due to "Violation of the intellectual property and impersonation or deceptive behavior provisions of the Content Policy." I'm going to try to get this sorted out, but in the meantime the APK is still available for you to download and install. Sorry for the inconvenience, guys.

@soup_menu: Thanks for the update. I was wondering what the issue was. I found it on Google Play, went threw everything, and in the end it just said it is no longer available on the store. Yet, it still allowed you to click Install and agree to the privacy policy. How weird.

Hope it gets back up real soon.

I've been using it a fair bit lately and it's a nice little app (coming from an Android developer myself). Is there a possibility to launch our own video player when playing a video? The default video player is kinda lacking...

Thanks! New app is better in all sorts of ways.

Aaaand my problems with it (on S3 stock ROM):

1. Video player no longer has jump back and jump forward buttons, which are easier to navigate with than selecting on the ?time bar?

2. Swiping to the right for the menu only works from the edge of the screen.

3. The home page flashes white before correcting itself in the dark theme.

4. When downloading, clicking the notification to open the download status screen and then pressing back returns to device home instead of the last activity (tested trying to return to Chrome).

5. The home page isn't a very useful default screen. Maybe only show it once per update?

6. I used to use MX Player to watch videos by adding the folder to it's search. This still works, but now it calls all files "Video" instead of an indicative name. I'll keep using WMVB to download for now because of this :/ An even better option would be to allow you to choose a player with Android's Open With screen (could be a toggle). That would be great :)

Nice and thanks :)

Hey, thanks for doing this. Managed to grab it before it went down, hope you get what ever issue it is sorted out.

Now you only have to port it to PlayStation Mobile, so I can watch the videos on my Vita without having to mess around with the browser. :P

For some reason I can't find the video file I've downloaded whilst browsing from my computer. I'm browsing "Computer\Nexus 4\Internal storage\Android\data\com.giantbomb.unofficial.gbvb.android\files\videos" and there are no video's there. It must be there, I can play it on my phone. But it's not showing.

@mattyftm: That's strange. What if you try using a file browser on the phone itself?

@ftomato: I ought to be able to address at least a few of those items. The one you're likely to see soonest is the ability to play videos in a third-party app.

As a general update, the wheels seem to be in motion for getting the app back in the Play store. I can't give an ETA at this point, but I'll keep you posted as I learn more.

Jusy got my first android and so happy to see this here. Thanks!!

@soup_menu: do you know why the app seems to breakdown on nexus 7 when I am downloading a video. It won't load any of the videos in the latest section (basically won't connect to the internet to load the list) and it doesn't play a lot of videos that I have already downloaded (will just spin in the video player).

@nixon34: I recently discovered that bug too. The good news is that I've found the cause and know how to fix it. The bad news is that I'm out of town at the moment, so it'll be at least a few days before I can get an update out.

Hang in there: a fix is coming.

Thanks for all the hard work on this!

@soup_menu: Thanks for all your hard work, going above and beyond!

Thanx for creating this app! I wanted to give you a good rating on the App Store but it was removed. Just wish the text was a little bit bigger and the thumbnails as well. But for the rest great work

Version 1.0.1 Released

Start your weekend off right with an update to Giant Bomb Video Buddy! Changes in this version include:

• Added the ability to play videos in a third-party app
• Fixed a bug where downloading videos could block other parts of the app from downloading data
• Improved the responsiveness of the download manager
• The app can now be installed to an SD Card

I'm still working to get the app back into the Play Store, but you can manually install the update right now.

If you're connecting using MTP, only files that the media scanner knows about will show up on your computer.

@soup_menu Notify the media scanner of newly created files by calling MediaScannerConnection.scanFile.

I like that this has the ability to play videos in another app. Used with mx player I can easily stream jar time like an audio podcast, which I'm doing while I type this.

Thanks for your continued work on this.

Version 1.0.2 Released

• Added fast forward and rewind buttons to the player
• Eliminted the flash of white when loading the home screen while using the dark theme

Back in the Saddle Play Store

Thanks to the help of the Giant Bomb crew (with a special shout-out to @jeff and @rorie), Giant Bomb Video Buddy is now back in the Google Play Store. If you don't have access to the Play Store, you can still download the new version directly.

Glad to have you back on the store, also loved the nod to Ryan. Gonna donate to show my support, I use this app daily. Also, I have a feature request. Have you looked into live stream support? Even if its only non-premium streams?

@djratchet: I'm not the developer, but there aren't any third party twitch apps that support streaming without using flash players that I could find, so it's probably not possible. However, the official Twitch.tv android app is pretty reasonable, it's only problem is not having chat support IMO. It's been receiving updates if you're against it for historic reasons.

Being able to change video quality in-play would be swell.

Noticed a problem, if you are playing a video, and pause it while full-screened, the app will not let the device sleep (display turn off).

@djratchet: @ftomato pretty much nailed it. Playing livestreams in-app is a no-go, but I haven't looked at the Twitch app in a while. When I get a chance I can see if there's a good way to use it to open the streams.

@zeyepawdz: The way things are set up right now that wouldn't be an easy change, but I can make a note to look into it somewhere down the line.

@psylah: That's actually the intended behavior right now. If it's an unpopular decision I'd be happy to revisit it, but for the moment it's likely to stay as-is.

@soup_menu: Ah, gotchya. I use the twitch app as of right now, but I would love to have all things Giant Bomb consolidated into one app, that's why I ask :) Definitely appreciate you looking into it, hell, I wouldn't even mind an option to view the flash embeds within the app, like Afterdroid, seeing as I have flash on my phone and tablet, but I can understand you may be wanting to avoid that seeing as Flash isn't officially supported on newer androids anymore, even if it still works.

Long pressing on a file in the download queue causes the app to crash, so there's no way to remove a file from the download queue, it has to download then you can delete it.

This happens on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9, SGH-I957 running 2.6.35 honeycomb.

@psylah: Thanks for the additional information. I saw the crash show up in my developer console, but under device it just said "OTHER" which, as you might imagine, isn't terribly helpful.

I just checked it out in the Honeycomb emulator and I'm able to reproduce the crash, so hopefully I'll be able to track it down without too much trouble.

If you don't mind my asking, is there any particular reason you've stuck with Honeycomb rather than upgrading to Ice Cream Sandwich? I did a bit of searching and it appears that ICS is available for the Tab 8.9, but I could be mistaken.

@soup_menu I love the app, thanks for all the hard work you put into it. Will you be adding Chromecast support? it would be a killer feature!

@soup_menu: I use my tablet primarily for watching GB videos or Youtube, so I've had no reason to upgrade it thus far. My phone on the other hand I've taken up to JB and I don't have the crashing problem.

@digeratix90: I don't have any plans right now, but if I get some time down the road it seems like it could be fun to play with. I'll definitely agree that when I saw the announcement I thought that it could be a good fit for Giant Bomb Video Buddy.

@psylah: Fair enough. I'll try to find a fix, but since the issue appears to be specific to Honeycomb and I only have 3 users on 3.x, it probably won't be my highest priority. I know that "try upgrading your operating system" isn't the most convenient recommendation, but if it's an important feature to you it may be the fastest way to get it working on your tablet.

Great app, duder! Sent along some cash out of appreciation, too.

I was wondering if you were considering expanding the app to have a news feature that includes the articles? Obviously at some point that's just a GB mobile app and may not be your purpose at all, but the mobile site is not as clean as your app and I'd love it to a one-stop spot for all GB content...