970849 - cnn.com video doesn't play in Firefox OS

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

Description

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

Site: http://edition.cnn.com/video/
cnn.com video doesn't play in Firefox OS

:: Steps To Reproduce

Load edition.cnn.com/video/

Rather than showing video, it shows a "needs Flash"-type error. It should send the HTML5-style <video> player to Firefox OS devices, like it does for other smartphones.

:: Expected Result

Video

:: Actual Result

Flash error

:: Additional Information

Software Version: 1.1
Reporter's User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0

Comment 1

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

Most smartphone devices are detected by client-side JavaScript on the page edition.cnn.com/video/ and redirected to edition.cnn.com/video/standard.html . This would likely work if they simply included Firefox OS devices among the devices they redirect to the standard.html page.

(The script has an amusing error that could be fixed at the same time: all smartphone devices that try to load edition.cnn.com/video without the trailing slash are taken to a 404 Not Found page, namely edition.cnn.com/videostandard.html )

Comment 2

[Adam Stevenson [:adamopenweb]]

Reached out to a contact via Facebook.

Comment 3

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Contacted someone from CNN today about it.

Comment 4

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

The redirect target URL - http://edition.cnn.com/video/standard.html - works in Firefox on Android but not quite in Firefox OS. The reason for that is this extra bit of sniffing:

var html5Check = /\b(iPad|iPod|iPhone|Android|Kindle|Silk|Fire)\b/.test(window.navigator.userAgent);
and the fact that it seems to default to a Flash player and only fall back to a HTML5 player when several requirements including user agent sniffing are met .. Which in turn causes this exception:

TypeError: this.getDOMPlayer(...) is undefined

Comment 5

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

They rolled out a new site, re-test?

Comment 6

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Both the pre-roll ad and the video work on my Flame (http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/01/05/bts-newday-alan-dershowitz-prince-andrew-sex-scandal-allegations.cnn).