875385 - canPlayType returns "" for video/mp4 even though playback is supported.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Audio/Video, defect)

Description

[Chandler]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.65 Safari/537.31

Steps to reproduce:

var elem = document.createElement('video'),
    response_1 = elem.canPlayType( 'video/mp4' ),
    response_2 = elem.canPlayType( 'video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42E01E"' )


Actual results:

response_1 === ""
response_2 === ""


Expected results:

response_1 === "maybe"
response_2 === "(maybe|probably)"

Both Firefox for desktop and Android can play mp4 videos such as http://www.w3schools.com/html/mov_bbb.mp4 but both browsers return empty strings for calls to canPlayType.

Comment 1

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

Attachment: Testcase from Comment 0

Comment 2

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

Chandler: Does this also happen with a nightly build? See http://nightly.mozilla.org/

Comment 3

[Chandler]

Frank: I get the same results with the nightly. I tried with the Windows Standard build; Funnelcake Jul 2012 mozilla12 - 1.0

Comment 4

[Chandler]

Just tried running the test case again in the nightly build and it is working as expected, with canPlayType returning "maybe" and "probably" for response_1 and response_2 respectively.

Comment 5

[Chris Pearce [:cpearce (Not reading bugmail)]]

Sounds like we've fixed the bug here then?

Comment 6

[Øyvind Smestad]

The testcase fails for me now on OSX 10.8.4 using:
* Firefox Nightly 26.0a1 (2013-09-17)
* Firefox Aurora 25.0a2 (2013-09-16)
* Firefox 24.0

It also returns empty string for the audio element when testing for mp4 support using .canPlayType('audio/mp4').

Comment 7

[Chris Pearce [:cpearce (Not reading bugmail)]]

We can't play back MP4 on OSX yet, which is why canPlayType() is not reporting that Firefox can play MP4.

Comment 8

[Chandler]

What do you mean you can't play it back? The MP4 video example at http://www.w3schools.com/html/mov_bbb.mp4 plays fine for me on OSX 10.8.4 with Firefox 24.0

Comment 9

[Øyvind Smestad]

I think what happens when following a link to an MP4 file directly (not embedded using a video tag) is that the file is opened using the Quicktime plugin.