Closed Bug 1123775 Opened 9 years ago Closed 8 years ago

HTML5 video / audio playback won't work with Windows N editions, with no feedback for the user

Categories

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect)

x86
Windows 8.1
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 848994

People

(Reporter: msoulatre, Unassigned)

Details

Attachments

(3 files)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150120030203

Steps to reproduce:

Using Windows N Edition (that doesn't include H.264 codecs), visit any website with HTML5 content (such as vine.com, archive.org, arkvid.tv etc.).

(tried with both stable and latest nightly Firefox branch)


Actual results:

No music / video playback, no feedback.


Expected results:

A way to tell the user the reason why it's not working.
(note : installing the windows update "Windows Feature Pack" solves the problem)
Component: Untriaged → Video/Audio
Product: Firefox → Core
The video controls do support showing an error message, and I remember an old bug or two about improving the error message specifically for when H.264 media is unplayable (instead of a generic unsupported-codec message). Is the error event not firing for some reason?

Also, can you provide a specific URL on archive.org that's triggering this for you?
I see no error message on the player. This will trigger on every media on archive.org that i tried (with the default HTML5 player), example :
https://archive.org/details/riderspurplesage_law_librivox

I do get an error when i try to open one of the (128Kbps) MP3 files listed below, such as
https://ia600400.us.archive.org/22/items/riderspurplesage_law_librivox/purplesage_01_grey.mp3

"Video can't be played because the file is corrupt."

This file plays fine on my install with the Media Feature Pack installed.
This is especially tricky for developers because video.canPlayType() returns 'probably' for 'video/mp4' even on Windows N editions where the decoder is not present. Test case attached as attachment 8607786 [details]. If Firefox returned '' from video.canPlayType('video/mp4') on Windows N editions, then developers could detect this situation and use a fallback mechanism to play the file.
Component: Audio/Video → Audio/Video: Playback
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 8 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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