1123775 - HTML5 video / audio playback won't work with Windows N editions, with no feedback for the user

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 848994

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

Description

[msoulatre]

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)

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

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?

Comment 2

[msoulatre]

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.

Comment 3

[byron]

Attachment: video.canPlayType example (with media file)

Comment 4

[byron]

Attachment: Test case (firefox-windows-n-h264) on Windows 7.

Comment 5

[byron]

Attachment: Test case (firefox-windows-n-h264) on Windows 7 (N Edition).

Comment 6

[byron]

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.

Comment 7

[Anthony Jones (:ajones, :kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e)]

This should be fixed by bug 1210231.