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How to get a video to play in FF, Chrome, IE and mobile?

nussjunk Member
in General support
I have my site running almost perfectly. The only problem, one I didn't realize because I mainly use Chrome and my iPhone's browser, is that the .mp4 files are not playing in Firefox or IE.

I'm using jPlayer. Everything runs swimmingly in Chrome. I have a mobile theme setup to where, for mobile devices like the iPhone, instead of loading the jPlayer, the video thumbnail loads which links to the .mp4 which the phone's video players (like Quicktime) will play, effortlessly.

The problem is in IE and Firefox. IE doesn't load the player and FF loads the player, but hitting play just leads to a black screen in jPlayer.

I've done a lot of research but found no information useful. I keep reading about a "fallback" that can load a .flv file in certain browsers instead of the .mp4. This does not work. Instead, ZenPhoto is making a new entry but using the same .jpg as the thumbnail/splash image.

For instance, I uploaded:
Video001.jpg
Video001.mp4
Video001.flv

This doesn't work. It makes 2 different entries into the album, one for the flash video and one for the mp4. They share the same thumbnail/splash image.

I'm trying to find a solution so that when I upload a video and it's corresponding thumbnail, it will play in FF, Chrome, IE, etc. It has to be able to work with what I have set up with my mobile theme which removes the video player in exchange for the thumbnail image and a link to the video file.

Does anyone have any ideas about this?

If you're interested in seeing the site, to possibly have a better understand of the goal I'm trying to achieve, the link is below.

This site is NSFW (Not Safe For Work). It is an adult "tube" style site.
<link remove by admin>

Comments

  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Generally jPlayer should work with all these using one .mp4 or .flv. I cannot reproduce any issues using a mp4 (.m4v) file: http://zenphoto.maltem.de/Test/Zenpage-Teaser.m4v.php

    On FF and IE it will then use the flash fallback:
    See which browser support what format:
    http://jplayer.org/latest/developer-guide/#reference-html5-media

    You should review your error logs.

    I deleted your link to avoid anyone being offended accidentally. If needed we can see it on your profile.
  • nussjunk Member
    Isn't that something. Your video worked for me in all browsers.

    Could you possibly share your m4v settings?
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    According to the movie the values are data rate 1.46 MB, 25 fps, H264, 768x576, Audio AAC 44.1 khz. It was exported on an older Mac via Quicktime. Nothing special set actually.
  • nussjunk Member
    Interesting discovery. My mp4 and m4v videos DO in fact play in firefox.

    What happened is I had a video that I thought wasn't playing in Firefox just sitting in an open tab. Apparently, the video had to completely load before it would start playing. This is not how the videos in jplayer respond when played in Chrome. The video size was about 120MB. Even with a smaller video, the video had to completely load before it would start playing. The problem with that is, people in Firefox and IE will think the video is broken and will likely just leave the site to never return.

    Do you know how I can fix this?
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Sorry, I have just adapted the player as a plugin. Firefox will use the Flash fallback for mp4 while Safari/Chrome/Webkit will play it as native HTML5. On the example on my test site I can clearly see that on Firefox it starts to play while being loaded (although its a small video).

    I cannot help with what browser does when or even what of that is browser or player itself. For the player specifics you would have to ask its vendor.
  • ikar Member
    FWIW, I've had better luck with flowplayer. I've also been converting my videos to relatively web-friendly m4v's, which are not having to load completely before playing. I toyed around with so many things when getting started that I don't recall the specific issues I was running into with jplayer, merely that it wasn't working as well for me on as many setups as flowplayer. The only ongoing issue I've had with flowplayer is when accessing my site from my home desktop (firefox on ubuntu linux), which requires my starting the video, then pausing and dragging the progress bar back to the beginning in order for the video to actually be visible. Once figured out it's only a minor inconvenience. No-one else who uses my site uses linux, and from that home desktop I access the content primarily by other software (it's home server based), so it's a non-issue for me personally.

    Point being, if you haven't earnestly tried it and continue to have problems with jplayer, it may be worth trying flowplayer.
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    I did never encounter any difference between flowplayer and jplayer actually with standard mp4/m4v. It all depends on the codecs and settings used.

    Of course the big disadvantage of our flowplayer plugin is that is it flash based and will probably not work that good on iDevices, although there is an extension included.

    We did not yet upgrade to the new flowplayer5 especially because it is still lacking audio support (unless that changed meanwhile).
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