1277760 - Hulu.com video player no longer works after bug 1186948

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Trevor Rowbotham [:rowbot]]

After landing bug 1186948, the Hulu.com video player no longer loads.  The user is shown a message stating "Hulu requires Flash Player 11.0.1.152 or higher. Please download and install the latest version of Flash Player before continuing.".

Hulu attempts to detect that flash is installed prior to attempting to load the player in [1] on line 10695.

Additionally, the article at [2] might need to be updated to reflect the changes of bug 1186948 if that change rides the train all the way to release.

[1] http://static.huluim.com/huluguru/application_core-ed289c2aa474431ba560123772f5fce7.js
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Plugins/Site_Author_Guide_for_Click-To-Activate_Plugins

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]:

Comment 2

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Tracking this regression for 49+ - this is a popular video site.

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Trevor, do you see either the plugin icon in the location bar? Since you didn't mention it, I presume the plugin infobar doesn't show?

Comment 4

[Trevor Rowbotham [:rowbot]]

Correct, both the plugin icon in the location bar and the plugin infobar are not present. Presumably, this is because the object tag is only inserted if both navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash"] and navigator.mimeType["application/x-shockwave-flash"] are present; both of which are no longer present after bug 1186948 when Flash is set to Ask to Activate.

Hulu appears to be using the following to determine whether to insert the Flash object into the page:

var b = navigator.plugins['Shockwave Flash'],
c = navigator.mimeTypes ? navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'] : !1;
b && b.description && c && c.enabledPlugin && (a = new deconcept.PlayerVersion(b.description.replace(/([a-zA-Z]|\s)+/, '').replace(/(\s+r|\s+b[0-9]+)/, '.').split('.')));

If the above fails, Hulu simply assumes that the browser is IE and falls back to trying to create ActiveXObjects.

Comment 5

[Trevor Rowbotham [:rowbot]]

Last I checked, Hulu had an experimental HTML player using DASH, but it only worked in Chrome since it only supported the Widevine CDM.  Now that nightly has Widevine, perhaps someone could convince Hulu to enable the HTML player for nightly users if they feel comfortable doing that.  Does anyone at Mozilla have a contact at Hulu?

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Resolved via backout.