1659174 - Can't play VP8 encoded video on www.ea.com because of lack of content sniffing

Status: NEW

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect, P3)

Description

[Ksenia Berezina [:ksenia]]

As reported in https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/56614

STR:

1. Open https://media.contentapi.ea.com/content/dam/ufc/ufc-4/videos/2020/07/training-hub/manual-grapple-assist-transition.mp4 in Firefox on desktop

Expected:
Video plays

Actual:
"No video with supported format and mime type found" message is shown

With the following error in the console:

Media resource https://media.contentapi.ea.com/content/dam/ufc/ufc-4/videos/2020/07/training-hub/manual-grapple-assist-transition.mp4 could not be decoded, error: Error Code: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_METADATA_ERR (0x806e0006)
Details: static MP4Metadata::ResultAndByteBuffer mozilla::MP4Metadata::Metadata(mozilla::ByteStream *): Cannot parse metadata

The codec being used appears to be VP8. And the format of the video is mp4 with video/mp4 content-type. According to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/Containers#MP4 , VP8 is not a supported codec for this container.

Wonder if it's a website issue (perhaps, WebM should be used instead of mp4)? Note that I'm able to play the video in Chrome but not is Safari.

Comment 1

[Jean-Yves Avenard [:jya]]

I wasn't aware that VP8 was officially supported by the mp4 container.

It's identical to vp9. So shouldn't be hard to implement.

While at it ; can we make the vpcC box content available in the "extradata" field of the mp4 metadata?

Comment 2

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

This is a misnamed WebM file being served with content-type: video/mp4, so it seems like a configuration issue on the site's end. I assume it works in Chrome due to sniffing the file type instead of trusting the content-type header, but I haven't checked.