HTML 5 videos (like Vine) won't play
Some HTML5 videos won't play in my Firefox browser.
This vine for example (https://vine.co/v/b3v5h3Piwt7) only shows up as a static image. I can click the mute/audio button though, but it won't play. When I look at the webconsole when I load the page then 2 javascript warnings show up, the first one say that the Mediasource [long url here] can't be encoded and another one says loading of all candidate sources failed. loading media paused.
I'm using Firefox 21.0 and I tried to run Firefox in safe mode with disabled add-ons, and I also tried to reinstall it, but without success.
Thanks in advance.
Chosen solution
You can try to set the media.windows-media-foundation.enabled pref to false on the about:config page to disable the built-in mp4 media player.
Read this answer in context 👍 253All Replies (5)
I did read the whole thread. All sorts of "fixes" were proposed, most involving hacking into the System by the User. And what a terrible shame that the Mozilla Team could not come up with and deploy a "workaround for the bug" for some 4 or 5 months, while all the other browser makers had the fix for Vine from Day 1.
One would think that the Mozilla team would be way ahead of the competition, not months behind. Just saying, someone at Mozilla needed to get on top of this one with a permanent fix, and not continue to deny it while trying to get Users to fix it for them. A little constructive criticism should not be ignored taken as a personal insult. If you want to be the default browser, you need to be better than the competition. Otherwise you will go the way of all the other abandoned browsers since 1992. RIP Nexus, Voila, Mosaic, Cello, Arena, Netscape, etc.
Modified by TrainerSteve
Shrug. Thats the way programming works. Bugs in the source can have different results depending on the compiler/interpreter. The proper fix (according to the JS standard) is in the git hub commit I posted. This is not a matter of opinion, this is fact.
I am not interested in platform evangelization. I generally leave that to people who are clueless.
This isn't about platform evangelism. It is about competitive advantages in an extremely fluid web. That Mozilla took so long to fix a basic problem with playing Twitter's Vines, an extremely popular web app, is disturbing. That one had to resort to using an alternative browser in the interim, just to view one's own Vines, is really, really sad.
Hopefully Mozilla will learn from it. But perhaps your screen name "nyet" says it all?
"It is about competitive advantages in an extremely fluid web"
Meaningless marketing speak, having nothing to do with the underlying technologies, which depend on standards insuring interoperability.
The fundamental source of the problem is Vine's source code. Period. That is where the bug lies. Whether or not Mozilla should have added a workaround (sooner) isn't really relevant, especially if the workaround has unintended side effects in the JS interpreter, which cause other issues.
I agree that their suggestions for fixes were not good ones (especially the suggestion that people disable html5).
But ultimately, the fault lies with vine, who should have properly tested their JS on firefox in the first place.
Question: how did vine launch w/o testing this?
Looks like vine fixed it on their end, finally.