669568 - FF asks user to download m4a clip, rather than playing in browser

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Suchema]

Attachment: Example m4a file

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.112 Safari/534.30

Steps to reproduce:

When trying to play sample audio tracks with file type m4a, firefox asks user to download file and open with a different application. This was not the behaviour previously exhibited (it seems to only have started happening approx. 3 / 4 weeks ago, possibly at the same time as an update?). Previously, the sample tracks would play within the browser. All of these tracks work without issue in the latest versions of Chrome, Opera and Safari.

In order to reproduce this bug, you can go to the following url:

http://www.shazam.com/music/web/track?id=53553506

Hovering on any of the tracks a 'play' option should appear - hit play and the problem should show itself.


Actual results:

Browser download dialogue was displayed.


Expected results:

The track should have played in browser.

Comment 1

[Robert Longson [:longsonr]]

What plugin are you using to play the files?

Comment 2

[Mardeg]

A search for mimetype to use for m4a files did not show application/octet-stream
I'm not sure if it depends on the codec but several were mentioned in results:

audio/x-m4a
audio/mp4
audio/mp4a-latm
audio/mpeg

It might be worth experimenting with each of those to see which are played by the desired plugin.

Comment 3

[Robert Longson [:longsonr]]

The file has a mime type of audio/mp4

Comment 4

[Suchema]

(In reply to comment #1)
> What plugin are you using to play the files?

When I attempt to play the clips (no plug in for playing the format installed), it exhibits the behaviour previously described. However, when I try in a browser with the QuickTime plugin installed (again, FF5), rather than asking me to download the file, nothing *appears* to happen. It just doesn't play (though Firebug tells me that the file itself is actually downloaded).

Comment 5

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

Confirmed against Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0a1) Gecko/20110706 Firefox/8.0a1 ID:20110706030833

Deleting pluginreg.dat/mimeTypes.rdf and setting QuickTime to locally play MP4-Field did not help.

Is this just a 'wrong MIME-Type sent'-Issue?

Comment 6

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Does this work today if you download an old Firefox 3.6 / 4.0 build and try to reproduce? That would help determine if it's a regression or not.

Comment 7

[Suchema]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Does this work today if you download an old Firefox 3.6 / 4.0 build and try
> to reproduce? That would help determine if it's a regression or not.

Hi - I've just tried and had the same issue after downloading and trying to play the tracks in 3.6 and 4.0.

Thanks

Comment 8

[Neil Dodd]

Hi, 

Any update on this please? It's a concern that this was working fine previously and is now broken. We're looking at having to compeltely hide this functionality for Firefox users and we'd obviously prefer not to have to do that. Any advice on next steps would be appreciated. 

Thanks,

Neil Dodd
Senior Product Manager, Shazam.com

Comment 9

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

This seems to WFM on a current Nightly on OS X.

At least, when I have the Quicktime Plugin enabled (which does list audio/mp4 in about:plugins), clicking the attachment here works. The Shazam link in comment 0 doesn't seem to do anything.

When the Quicktime Plugin is disabled, I do indeed get the Open/Save dialog. Which I assume is correct, when clicking a link to a file that the browser can't render itself or with a plugin.

Comment 10

[sandra.yambay]

Attachment: ghfnjhu