How to enable CORS headers for various types of video hosting
Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a mechanism allowing websites to request restricted resources from other websites with different domain. CORS defines the rules that are used when server is trying to determine whether it is safe to share resources or not.
Both HLS Streaming and our Thumbnail generator require enabled CORS headers to work properly. Here's a guide on how to do it for various types of video hosting.
Go to Distribution Settings -> Bahaviors. You can edit the Default behavior
Go to Forward Headers and change None (Improves Caching) to Whitelist
A new property will appear - Whitelist Headers. Here you should see three default headers. Select all of them and click Add. They will move to the box on the right and you can save the changes by clicking Yes, Edit in the bottom right corner.
Changing behaviour settings in CloudFront
It will take some time for these changes to take effect due to caching of the CloudFront network.
Clearing the CloudFront Cache
If you have an existing distribution that is already used for serving video content and you add the CORS headers, or do any other change that can affect the videos, you should clear the cache on all edge servers. This way you can make sure that the changes are really applied instead of using the cached old version.
To clear the cache, you will have to create an invalidation in the distribution settings.
Start with opening the settings of the distribution you want and go to the Invalidations tab. There click on the Create Invalidation button.
Now you can select, which objects (in this case videos) you want to clear from the cache. We of course want to clear them all, so we can use the "*" wildcard. Therefore, just write "/*" - that specifies all the objects in the source bucket of your distribution. Afterwards click the Invalidate button.
Using the "*" wildcard to clear the whole CloudFront cache
The invalidation will take a only a minute or two. You will see that it's finished when the status changes from "In progress" to "Completed".
To enable CORS headers in BunnyCDN settings please follow these steps:
1. Log in to your BunnyCDN profile.
2. Go to Pull zones in the general menu and open designated pull zone
Bunny CDN Pull Zones menu
3. Go to Headers settings
4. Fill in designated file extensions that you want to allow. Add m3u8 and ts to cover needs to HLS stream playback. Also add mp4 if you are using it for video to allow the FV Player screenshot feature to work. Adding vtt will also allow you to serve subtitles.
3. Select your desired zone and click on Manage and open Edit option.
Editing a KeyCDN zone
4. Then select Show advanced features and set CORS Headers to enabled.
5. Save your settings.
Besides bringing new features into FV Player we also focus on explaining and helping our users with using those which are already part of our player. You can help us a lot with it by giving us valuable feedback.
So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forums!