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FlowPlayer sometimes black box instead of video

marjolein Member
in Plugins
I'm using the Flowplayer plugin. I uploaded some video and audio and that works great!

But: sometimes I just get a black box instead of the video or audio. I know it's not the audio or video file because before that it was just working fine. When this problem starts none of the video or audio will work anymore. I have to wait a while and then it starts to work again.

Does anyone know what is happening here? How can I solve this?

Comments

  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    What Zenphoto version? If not 1.4 please upgrade.
  • marjolein Member
    I'm using Zenphoto version 1.3.1.2. I'll upgrade to 1.4 and let you know if this solves this issue. Thank you so much!
  • marjolein Member
    I did the upgrade to 1.4 and video and audio works fine now. Thank you so much!
  • marjolein Member
    I was a bit to early telling you that everything was working fine now. Also after upgrading to 1.4 I still have the "black box" problem. One moment a video works file, the next moment I get only a black box when trying to play the same video. After a while (or the next morning) it will play again.

    Hitting the reload button of my browser does help sometimes. I already cleared the cache of my browser and windows system, and tried different computers (XP and windows7). I also deinstalled flash en reinstalled version 9 and 10. Nothing helps! The only thing that works is clicking next to the black box, so that the video file opens in my browser window. There it will be loading for a little while, and after pressing the back button the video will play again. I hope that someone can help me solve this problem!
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    I recently discovered a wrong comma in the js config for Flowplayer that only affects IE (I did not notice it as I am on Mac). That might be causing this (also very big files that require some loading might as well). Please see the news section post for the quick 1.4 bugfixes.
  • marjolein Member
    I replaced flowplayer-2.3.4.min.js with the nightly build version, but the black box problem is still there. In IE8 I have 2 "error on page" messages (object doesn't support this property or method)for "colorbox" and "flowplayer". If I remove all the plugin variables from the flowplayer call I have only the colorbox error message left, but the result is still the same. Is it possible that colorbox is creating my problem?

    I'm using video and audio file with a file size of about 20-30mb. Is this to big for the flowplayer plugin?
  • fretzl Administrator, Developer
    Could you provide some more info please ;-)
    Are you using a standard theme or a customized one ?
    What kind of video files do you have?(i.e. .flv, .mp4, etc.)
    Do you perhaps have a link to the site?

    Btw 20-30 MB should be no problem.
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    THe fix was not in the flowplayer.js file but in the actual plugin file. Never just replace parts of a plugin if told so, always all.
  • marjolein Member
    I started with a new zenphoto 1.4 installation. I'm using the default theme and uploaded 1 picture and 2 video's (flv and mp4). The picture is working fine, the video's both show a black box only.
    I looked at the bugfixes news section but didn't make any changes to my flowplayer3.php because I don't know where the syntax error is located in that file.

    You can see the gallery at: http://www.noorkamerbeek.nl/zentest

    Thank you so much!
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Make sure you used the right codec settings for the mp4 and the right codec for the .flv (which is a container). Flowplayer requires pretty default encoding settings. Please refer to the Flowplayer site itself for info about that.
  • fretzl Administrator, Developer
    I just tested a few video's from your site with the official 1.4 release and with the latest nightly.
    They work fine !
    I guess there must be something wrong with your installation but I can't suggest anything apart from a complete reinstall.
  • marjolein Member
    The flowplayer plugin is working now! I started very simple with the simple install from the flowplayer site. When I installed the files on my server it's wasn't working either and I had the same black box. With the help of the flowplayer forum I found out that gzip for swf files had to be disabled on the server. So I installed 2 .htaccess files:

    file 1 in the same folder as the .swf files (/zenphot/zp-core/zp-extensions/flowplayer3):
    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteRule . - [E=no-gzip:1]

    file 2 in the album folder (/zenphoto/albums):
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .avi$ no-gzip dont-vary
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .mov$ no-gzip dont-vary
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .mp3$ no-gzip dont-vary
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .mp4$ no-gzip dont-vary
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .flv$ no-gzip dont-vary

    The first file disables gzipping for swf-files. After this the flash-files are working, but in my case mp3 and mp4 isn't. So i decided to disable gzipping also for all audio and video formats in the folder (and subfolders of) albums. After this all the file formats are working.
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