.mov videos?

Graeme 10 years, 5 months ago

Hi Team

I’ve been happily using FV Player for 3 years now. All my videos are on Amazon S3, in the .mov format.

Now with the upgrade to FV 5 they won’t play on iPad or iPhone.

I have over 100 videos in a membership site.

Please advise

Thanks, G

Viewing 22 replies - 1 through 22 (of 22 total)

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Graeme,

thank you for the bug report!

We just released version 2.1.18 which fixes the issue with MOV files. This extension was not properly processed for HTML5 video. You should be able to upgrade your site to this version in a bit, but it might take your site a bit of time to realize that there is a new version.

To speed it up, you can just remove the plugin and then re-install it. That will force WordPress to realize there is a new version.

Thanks,
Martin

Graeme 10 years ago

Hi Martin
Thanks for the SUPER-SPEEDY response. Really awesome, and on the weekend too! The fix allows videos to be played on iPad and iPhone now.

However, on my laptop, Chrome won’t play them – I get a “html5: Video file not found” error message.

On Safari, when the video starts to play, it’s about 50 pixels narrower than the thumbnail image behind it. So on either side there’s a strip of the thumbnail jpeg.

Firefox is perfect and plays to correct width. And I haven’t tried IE as I only run on Mac.

You can have a look on this page: http://www.theonlinedogtrainer.com/members/

Many thanks, Graeme

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Graeme,

just a quick guess – your MOV video is served with mime type of “video/quicktime”. Could you please adjust that to “video/mp4” and then check clear your Chrome browser cache and see if that helped?

Here’s our article about how to fix the mime type on Amazon S3 quicky and for many files: http://foliovision.com/wordpress/plugins/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/fix-amazon-mime-type

It you only have few videos, you can change it using your Amazon Management Console, you will have to go file be file however.

We will have a closer look tomorrow and will look for a way of improving this in our plugin.

Thanks,
Martin

Graeme 10 years ago

Hi Martin

Changed all the mime types as per the instructions to video/mp4, cleared the Cache, but still same result on Chrome – error message within the video box:
html5: Video file not found

Safari still squeezes the vido width by about 25px on either side.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, G

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Graeme,

1. I tested the video with both video/quicktime and video/mp4 mime type in Chrome. Actually both work just fine, so that’s not causing this.

2. I tested this some more – the problem appears to be with the video auto buffering. When Settings –> FV WordPress Flowplayer –> “Auto Buffering” is turned on, Chrome seems to have issues with MOV. Please try to disable this option and see if that helps. It helped on our test site.

Details: there appears to be some bug with this – when I have this “Auto Buffering” enabled, the video plays the first time, but if I try to play the video again, or you click a link to some other video, it won’t play. I’m having this issue with Chrome 21 (seems to affect both MP4 and MOV) and also Chrome 27 (affects MOV only). When I reload the page, the video plays fine again.

For now, could you please disable “Auto Buffering” and let us know if it helped?

3. Regarding the Safari size issues – you set the player size to 450x300px, while the video is 320x240px. So your player size is of 1.5:1 aspect ratio, while the video is 1.33:1. The splash image looks distorted (too wide) in comparison to what’s in video also.

Player should use the same dimensions as the video, or it should at least respect the aspect ratio – 450x337px.

Thanks,
Martin

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Graeme,

I did some more testing. Here’s our test post: http://lifeinamovie.com/2013/07/01/local-mov-file/

The first video (on your original location) won’t play in Chrome for me. The second and third video is a copy of your file on our test server. That one plays fine.

I’m not sure what’s the problem with your server, that Chrome won’t play with it. I don’t see anything strange in the HTTP response headers, except that your server doesn’t send “Connection: close”. Do you use any access restrictions on your Amazon S3?

When I reload the page and play the video, it plays – as if it actually buffered in some data after I tried to play it unsuccessfully in the previous page load. Then I can also seek in the video.

So right now, our best guess is, that your video just sends some different headers than most of the videos and that confuses Chrome. I checked headers of some other videos on Amazon S3 and I haven’t noticed this.

Thanks,
Martin

Graeme 10 years ago

Hey Martin. Thanks for all the time and testing.

On your test page, I can’t view any of the videos. The first gives me the Html5: Video file not found message and the other 2 just keep showing the three dots.

My business partner and I have since decided to move to Wistia.

I thank you again for amazing support.

Best, G

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Graeme,

we did more testing – the videos play in Windows 7 with Chrome 27, Windows XP with Chrome 27, but not on Windows 8 with Chrome 27. Then we try the Windows 8 with Chrome 27 again and it plays…

MOV files are not supported by HTML5 very well (issues in different kinds of browsers), so some HTML5 players don’t support them at all. For example MediaElement.js refuses to play them at all and there are mixed responsed from Video.js. Bare bones HTML5 player also won’t play MOV in all the Chrome browsers we tested.

I checked your video on Wistia – they re-encoded the video into MP4 for you. So we need to warn people who use MOV on their site.

Thanks,
Martin

Graeme 10 years ago

Thanks for the update Martin.

It’s a pity because the MOV videos were a 10th of the size of an mp4. Helps with storage and bandwidth costs.

Again your commitment and professionalism is second to none.

Cheers

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Graeme,

there should be no big size difference between MOV and MP4. If there is, it suggests that you used bad encoding settings – too much bitrate.

Thanks,
Martin

Wendy 10 years ago

Hi Martin,

I followed the instructions for AWS on the video issues, and then got this different warning, that asked me to re-encode:

Warning: We recommend that you re-encode your MOV video into MP4
format. MOV is not be 100% compatible with HTML5 and might not play in Google Chrome. Read our article about video encoding

All videos are playing fine on both chrome and firefox. It’s unrealistic for us to get stuff re-encoded. I don’t have access to the AWS console, so I had to ask someone to follow the original
instructions, but can’t do much more testing with changing those
settings.

Can you tell me a particular platform that I can check that may show me that there are actually problems with playing this video? I’m inclined to ignore the “video issues” warning if I can’t reproduce a problem. I switched the settings back to where they were, as everything was working fine on a number of platforms,

Thanks,
Wendy

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Wendy,

we had issues with MOV videos on Chrome, but not all the time. It appears that the HTML5 player in Chrome has some bugs. And MOV is also not officially supported by HTML5, as it might contain weird codecs, not just the right ones like MP4.

Please post the detailed MOV information (you can use the “Send to Foliovision” feature of the video checker), so we can then check what codecs it is using and figure out if it’s the same troublesome codec which was giving us and Graeme trouble.

Thanks,
Martin

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Wendy,

thank you for the video details submission.

1. You are serving the files with the video/quicktime mime type. This has to be set to video/mp4 as we suggest, otherwise they won’t play in Firefox on PC. I tested it on Windows 8 just now and it was not playing. I also updated our video checker to say “Firefox on Windows does not like MOV files with video/quicktime mime type” instead of just “Firefox does not like MOV files with video/quicktime mime type”.

Full guide about how to fix the mime type on many files on Amazon S3 was posted here, so you can follow that: http://foliovision.com/wordpress/plugins/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/fix-amazon-mime-type

2. Next, we recommend to re-encode the file into MP4 as there might be issue in Google Chrome browser. I was not able to replicate this issue with your video on neither Chrome 21.0.1180.90 on Mac OS X 10.5.8 nor on Chrome 28.0.1500.72 m on Windows 8, but all the technical details of the video look the same as the video which was giving us trouble.

Actually – the Chrome issue only appears when Auto Buffering is set to yes. So we can either only show this warning when auto buffering is on, or always disable auto buffering for MOV videos, or only disable it for Chrome. We are releasing a new version today, this will have to wait however. If you test this, don’t forget to clear your browser cache between tests.

Anyway, MOV is not an official HTML5 format, many players just don’t play it at all, so we don’t recommend it.

Thanks,
Martin

Wendy 10 years ago

OK, I had written that I got a different error after I got the mime
type changed, so I changed them back. Is there a global way to change
them in AWS, as I don’t have access to the console.

Thanks!
Wendy

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Wendy,

please read my last message in this thread. There is link to a guide on how to fix mime type on Amazon S3 for multiple files at once.

It does require the access to the Amazon account though. I’m afraid that if you don’t have access, you can’t change it. You can perhaps ask the Amazon S3 support to fix it for you, but they will probably want to make sure you own the account too.

Thanks,
Martin

Wendy 10 years ago

Thanks, Martin,

I just changed the mime type, and it looks like now I’m getting an
encoding warning. I did spend some more time reading all the docs, and
since I don’t do the encoding either, I want to make sure I understand
so I can communicate to whoever does. I haven’t done encoding in a
couple of years, so bear with me. I guess my file was encoded as
“quicktime” and it should be .mp4? I also read the part about how
chrome will abandon mp4 at some future point, so
“Your best bet for reliable HTML5 video is to provideMP4 and WEBM
variants for each of your videos.” Can you point me to the
documentation for using a variant?

Also, if there’s a platform that I can reproduce the video not playing
on, that would be helpful too.

Thanks again,
Wendy
Martin 10 years ago
Hello Wendy,

1. Your original warning was like this, it listed multiple issues:
```
Bad mime type: Video served with a bad mime type video/quicktime!  ...



Warning: We recommend that you re-encode your MOV video into MP4 format. ...
```
So now that you fixed the mime type, the second issue needs to be fixed too:

`Warning: We recommend that you re-encode your MOV video into MP4 format. …`

At least that’s what I was able to notice.

2. We a bit behind on documenting the WebM, as we are actually trying to make the MP4 the single winning format here. Google Chrome promised to remove the HTML5 support for MP4 for some time now, but it’s still there, so this is bit of an open question right now. On the other hand some older versions of Chrome have problems with playback of MP4.

You can use WinFF for WebM (Windows and Linux) or Miro Video Converted (Mac). List of WebM converters can be found here: http://www.webmproject.org/tools/ The settings are similar to HandBrake which is described in the article: foliovision.com/wordpress/plugins/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/encoding

Thanks,
Martin
Martin 10 years ago

Hello Wendy,

3. you asked about a platform where you can see this fail. We noticed that Chrome has issues with MOV when the autobuffering is enabled and it seems to affect MP4 too. So perhaps we need to disable the autobuffering in Chrome for MOV and it will be fine.

I wrote about in this support thread here: http://foliovision.com/support/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/troubleshooting/mov-videos#post-1906

And also more recently here: http://foliovision.com/support/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/troubleshooting/mov-videos#post-1982

Thanks,
Martin

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Wendy,

We are releasing a new version 2.1.27, which automatically disables auto buffering when video is MOV and is opened in Chrome.

However we also noticed that in previous versions the auto buffering was broken. So it will turn itself off after the upgrade as you might waste a lot of bandwidth now that it really works.

Please check our notes in Change Log for more information.

Thanks,
Martin

Sozo 10 years ago

Hi again. I believe I found a possible bug.

In firefox the player will not play .mov video files. That same file plays in the same player ( I used a post on my test site to verify) perfectly fine in all other browsers including mobile iOS.

I’ve tested this situation on three different computers with two different versions of Firefox (v21 &v22) with the same results. Again, that same post plays perfectly in all other browser but will not play in Firefox.

If you take the file outside of the player it plays perfectly fine in firefox. Place it inside the player and it will not play. When testing I was able to get one html5 error that said that the file could not be found, which is odd because it plays fine everywhere else.

So as far as I can tell, other than this Firefox bug with .mov file everything else works great.

Thanks!!

Martin 10 years ago

Hello Sozo,

could you please use the built-in video checker and send the video details report from there?

The required steps are in “How to check my video properties using the built-in checker” question of our FAQ, just make sure you hit the “Send to Foliovision” after you open the video checker message.

This will allow us to check details of your video file and double check that you are not using the bad mime type for serving of MOV files (Firefox on Windows does not like MOV files with video/quicktime mime type).

Thanks,
Martin

Sozo 10 years ago

Hi Martin,

It was a bad mime type, I apologize. I had turned off the checker before and failed to turn it back on. I made the recommended change to the .htaccess file and it immediately fixed the problem.

However:

When videos play in Firefox there is a 1x splashed on the screen in a light grayed out box when the play button is pressed. This happens for all users. Is this a setting we can turn off, I’ve looked but didn’t see anything?

Thank you!

Viewing 22 replies - 1 through 22 (of 22 total)