only sound with .mp4 files in firefox - javascript

I'm using the mediaelementjs gem implementing the 2.13.1 version.
Everything works fine in Chrome and Safari. However Firefox will only play the sound when trying to read a .MP4 file.
http://mediaelementjs.com/media/echo-hereweare.mp4 when using this one, the video and
sound play well (however the fullscreen button doesn't work)
http://video-js.zencoder.com/oceans-clip.mp4 but when using this one, only the sound play
and the video won't show up.
My code is very simple:
$(element).html(
'<video src="http://video-js.zencoder.com/oceans-clip.mp4" '+
'width="320" '+
'height="240"'+
'</video>'
);
$('video,audio').mediaelementplayer(/* Options */);
Is this a bug from mediaelementjs or am I missing something ?

Firefox does not support the H.264 codec (usually used in .mp4) natively, it relies on your OS decoders to play it (this currently only works on Windows, and only on Windows 7 or 8). If your OS has no decoders installed it won't play the video at all.
Chrome, IE and Safari include their own H.264 decoders. Firefox doesn't because the H.264 codec isn't royalty-free so Mozilla would have to pay to include a H.264 decoder in Firefox. Furthermore it is against the foundation's open-source philosophy to include a very patented and very non-free (as in freedom) codec in its free and open source browser.
A solution is to provide a flash-based alternative as a fall-back. Another solution is to provide the file in two formats, e.g. H.264 and WebM which covers all large current browsers.

Related

Expo video not showing on iOS [duplicate]

I am trying to stream hls on safari iOS with Aframe that has three.js under the hood. But the video shows a black screen with just the audio playing. The video src is of type .m3u8. I tried to read through a lot of related posts but none seem to have a proper solution. Is it some kind of a wishful thinking getting HLS & WebGL to play on iOS? If not, can some one please help me with a solution.
A couple of discussions on the issues that are available on github:
HLS m3u8 video streaming
HLS on Safari
To your question:
Is it some kind of a wishful thinking getting HLS & WebGL to play on iOS?
Yes, wishful thinking :-) The problem/issue/bug is with Apple, not any library. No matter what the JS library, A-Frame, Three, etc, this will always be an issue on any browser in iOS (all browsers on iOS are basically wrappers for Safari), and OSX Safari.
The issue is this (from my understanding):
At some point in the history of WebGL, there were restrictions on cross-origin content (videos, images, etc). I can't find a source for this, but I remember reading it somewhere, so this might not be 100% accurate.
Recently (a couple years ago? 2015?) all major browsers came to the conclusion that cross-origin media for use in WebGL was safe. Except Apple/Safari.
For most browsers, the crossorigin attribute on a <video> element could signal that this content came from another source. In Safari, for whatever reason, this attribute is ignored or not implemented. In fact, it looks like WebKit, which Safari is based on, fixed this as far back as 2015, but Apple still does not implement it. Even Apple refuses to comment on any progress.
Possible workarounds:
WebGL on Safari works with progressive (not a stream like HLS/Dash) .mp4 videos. Check out any 360 video on Facebook (website, not app) in iOS/Safari, and you'll note the source is an .mp4.
Use HLS (or Dash), but play the video flat, without WebGL. Check out any 360 video on YouTube (website, not app), and I think they are using HLS or Dash, but the point is they stream the video, whereas Facebook doesn't.
Here's a good starting point to the real issue: link.
Here's another detailed thread: link.
https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js#compatibility
Please note: iOS Safari "Mobile" does not support the MediaSource API.
Safari browsers have however built-in HLS support through the plain
video "tag" source URL. See the example above (Getting Started) to run
appropriate feature detection and choose between using Hls.js or
natively built-in HLS support.
When a platform has neither MediaSource nor native HLS support, you
will not be able to play HLS.
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/hls.js#latest"></script>
<!-- Or if you want a more recent canary version -->
<!-- <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/hls.js#canary"></script> -->
<video id="video"></video>
<script>
var video = document.getElementById('video');
if (Hls.isSupported()) {
var hls = new Hls();
hls.loadSource('https://video-dev.github.io/streams/x36xhzz/x36xhzz.m3u8');
hls.attachMedia(video);
hls.on(Hls.Events.MANIFEST_PARSED, function() {
video.play();
});
}
// hls.js is not supported on platforms that do not have Media Source Extensions (MSE) enabled.
// When the browser has built-in HLS support (check using `canPlayType`), we can provide an HLS manifest (i.e. .m3u8 URL) directly to the video element through the `src` property.
// This is using the built-in support of the plain video element, without using hls.js.
// Note: it would be more normal to wait on the 'canplay' event below however on Safari (where you are most likely to find built-in HLS support) the video.src URL must be on the user-driven
// white-list before a 'canplay' event will be emitted; the last video event that can be reliably listened-for when the URL is not on the white-list is 'loadedmetadata'.
else if (video.canPlayType('application/vnd.apple.mpegurl')) {
video.src = 'https://video-dev.github.io/streams/x36xhzz/x36xhzz.m3u8';
video.addEventListener('loadedmetadata', function() {
video.play();
});
}
</script>

Recording video HTML5

I want to be able to record videos with audio using HTML and Javascript.
After some research i can get video streaming with getUserMedia. Also There is WebRTC for recording but as far as i understood its not yet implemented in desktop browsers (only mobile browsers support it). So now i can just capture video, but i cant save it to server or record it.
What other options do i have ?. Does anyone knows a good flash alternative or HTML5 alternative that allows me to capture and save video to server with audio and also has maximum time of recording
Full disclosure: I work for Ziggeo.
When it comes to WebRTC, here is the rundown for browsers supporting it:
on Chrome and Opera, you have to record audio and video separately and encode them yourself in JS; then, send them to your servers and transcode them using e.g. ffmpeg to mp4s and other target formats
on Firefox, you can get a webm object for video and audio combined and send it to your servers.
For all other browsers and older versions of the ones mentioned you'd need to fall back to Flash recording which usually is based on RTMP and flv.

Flowplayer HTML5 Video Not Found

I have flowplayer running on a page in a slight variation of the playlist demo on their site, and for the most part it seems okay.
However, when I pause the video and switch to another video in the playlist on Chrome, once in a while, it will say HTML5 video not found (it will list the current video, not the one selected).
This will proceed to break the player and the page, forcing a refresh. The message also seems to show up on page refresh sometimes, but that doesn't matter much since it will be reloaded.
I am not sure what is wrong, but I have two theories.
1) MP4 file not streamable
-possible but unlikely considering I can jump around the video easily
2) Timeout from S3
-maybe, but I don't see any errors.
Has anyone seen this/know how to debug it?
The first thing to do would be to test this in another browser. If it works ok then it will be a video compatibility issue with the browser.
Mozilla has a very good article on Media formats supported. In it it states:
The MP4 container format with the H.264 video codec and either the AAC audio codec or the MP3 audio codec is natively supported by Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome, but Chromium and Opera do not support the format. Firefox will soon support the format, but only when a third-party decoder is available.
For the best cross browser support you really need two video formats MP4 and WebM

HTML5 video: How to test for HLS playing capability? (video.canPlayType)

I have video which is delivered over HLS. Now I'd like to test in JavaScript if the device actually can play HLS video in HTML5.
Usually in Javascript I did something like
document.createElement('video').canPlayType('video/mp4')
However I can't figure out which 'type' is the right one for HLS.
Apple's Safari HTML5 Audio and Video Guide seems to suggest "vnd.apple.mpegURL" ("Listing 1-7 Falling back to a plug-in for IE")
<video controls>
<source src="HttpLiveStream.m3u8" type="vnd.apple.mpegURL">
<source src="ProgressiveDowload.mp4" type="video/mp4">
....
but canPlayType("vnd.apple.mpegURL") return an empty string even on iOS devices which can play actual HLS streams perfectly fine.
Is there any way to check for playback capabilities without 'external knowledge' (e.g. "check for iOS user agent and assume it can play hls")?
I know I can specify multiple sources in a element and the browser will use the first playable source. However in my case I need feed a single URL to JW Player which I can't modify. So somehow I need to find the "best playable URL" from a set of video encodings. (An open source JS library which handles source selection would be a nice workaround though.)
I haven't tested this across the board, but it looks like you should be testing for the full HLS mimetype application/vnd.apple.mpegURL instead of just just vnd.apple.mpegURL.
application/x-mpegURL and audio/mpegurl are also suitable mimetypes for the HLS m3u8 file. audio/x-mpegurl is also listed as an acceptable mimetype according to Apple, but it doesn't appear to be mentioned in the actual HLS draft spec.
In Safari on iOS and OS X,
document.createElement('video').canPlayType('application/vnd.apple.mpegURL')
returns maybe. I'm not sure if there are any other browsers that support HLS -- Android doesn't seem to like this syntax (despite some assertions I've seen to the contrary), and I believe that it may be due to the fact that the actual video playback is delegated to an external application, rather than the browser itself.
References:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#technotes/tn2235/_index.html
http://www.longtailvideo.com/html5/hls
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-03
http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/documentation/AudioVideo/Conceptual/Using_HTML5_Audio_Video/Using_HTML5_Audio_Video.pdf

Javascript player for web video streaming compatible with iPad, iPhone, etc

I'm looking for a web video player with which I can keep the full compatibility with iOS devices: iPad, iPhone, etc (so I would exclude all Flash video players).
Until now I've used Flowplayer but I have some problems:
the main problem is that using flv files I can start very fastly to play the video but I don't have any compatibility with iOS devices. Instead, using mp4 files, I have the full compatibility with iOS devices but before playing the video I have to wait that all content of the file has been loaded (few minutes).
So my question is: does it exist a video format that allows me to play videos very fastly and also compatible also with iOS devices?
Not talking about HTML5 just yet, lets assume you are first interested in supporting most users and legacy devices. Unless you are using an embedded player, (such as Flash), there is nothing inherent in all browsers and/or JavaScript to allow you to play a video that is standardized across these devices. If you simply reference a link to the video file, you are asking the device to natively download and decode the video file. This is why it does not typically begin playing until the entire file is downloaded. This is dependent on each device having a compatible MIME encoding configured for the file type which points to a player that the browser can invoke to handle the file. When you use something like Flowplayer, usually these Flash applications can begin playing video before it is fully downloaded because it knows how to download the video from your server over HTTP and once it has received enough of the video stream (buffered the video), it can begin playing it. Currently your best option is to use something like you have been using for most devices, and have a separate link to the mp4 for iOS devices. If you just re-encode any videos you already have in FLV or whatever older formats you have been using to mp4, you should be able to play that in a current version of any Flash based player, as Flash will work with those files as well as it's legacy formats.
I've found this resource and it seems to be very good: http://code.google.com/p/php-mobile-detect/

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