CBS.com Video Player Full Screen Bug

My fiancee and I were watching 'TV' last night. (I say 'TV' in quotes because, since getting FiOS, we don't actually watch TV anymore -- opting instead to consume most of our media through Hulu, Netflix -- and, of course, South Park Studios).

But last night, she had a hankering for Medium or Ghost Whisperer, and searching Hulu we discovered that Hulu links to CBS.com to watch these shows.

We *also* discovered that we dislike the CBS video player a great deal. One of the key UX issues, from my perspective, is how the ads take over the page -- not just the player -- in effect totally obscuring the player. And it does this in such a way as to require a keen eye to realize you're watching an ad that you just need to wait through before you can watch your show.

But, that's just a small annoyance. What was much worse was a full-screen bug we discovered. The context for the bug appears to be:

• watching in full-screen mode
• in a two-monitor setup (like the one we have for our home entertainment system)

It seems that the CBS player doesn't calculate coordinate space properly in full-screen mode. The upshot is one of two scenarios (screenshots below). Both screenshots represent a capture of the entire screen in full-screen mode -- one at 1280x800 and one at 1920x1200.

In the first, you'll see I only see the upper-left of the player in full-screen mode -- cropping out most of the video and all of the video controls. Good thing I know to click 'esc' to exit full-screen mode! And in the second, you'll see that full-screen mode only makes use of the top half of my monitor (so, it's more appropriately termed half-screen mode, I suppose).

Well, because I've encountered this bug in the past, and know exactly what was causing it, I knew to switch my monitors to mirroring mode would fix the issue -- and it did, and we watched the Ghost Whisperer. But, every other major player out there works just fine for us, we should not have to change our monitor setup to watch CBS content (and I guarantee my fiancee would not have known to do that on her own, if I hadn't been watching with her). If CBS isn't going to allow me to watch on Hulu, then they should really get someone to fix their Flash video player.

ahem! Just FYI, Almer/Blank does that sort of thing a lot .