Some users seeing HTML5 Error for encrypted HLS

Hello, am currently hosting videos on DigitalOcean. All videos were encoded by Coconut and are in the m3u8 format.

They play great most of the time, but I continue to receive regular complaints from users getting either the “HTML5: video not properly encoded” or “HTML:5 video not found” errors. It is definitely a minority of users, but it is happening enough that it is becoming a real problem. Unfortunately I have not been able to replicate the issue on any of my devices.

The actual web pages are behind a paywall, but here is an accessible test page with an identical set up:

https://ballstrikingblueprint.com/members/fv-player-test/

I can’t be certain, but it seems to be happening most often (potentially only) in Safari. Have had reports from mobile and laptop/computer devices. I saw in a similar support ticket something about a possible issue with iCloud Private Relay. I have not asked any users if they have this enabled, however it did not produce the HTML5 error on either my mac or my iPhone when I enabled it as a test.

I have asked users to try a different web browser and that often seems to work, however I have also had users report back that the issue went away even while still using Safari, so it seems to happen erratically.

The Video Checker tool reports back Video OK. It does list about a dozen items under the “Video:” section, some of which include the error, “parse_playlist error Server returned 403 Forbidden (access denied).” All of these seem to be followed by a line that looks like it is successfully opening the same file (see attached image).

Thanks,

Aaron

video-checker-forum