Vines have progressively stopped playing
Now, it's been a while, so forgive me if all of the details here are a little sketchy. I think that it was as of Firefox 35.0, embedded Vines stopped playing. This means that Vines viewed through Tumblr.com, Twitter.com, etc. all stopped functioning. However! As long as I clicked and viewed the Vine directly on Vine.co, the video would play back just fine.
As of Firefox 36.0, Vine has completely stopped working in every capacity. Doesn't matter where and how I view them, they never play back.
Important things to note:
- Every other video on the entire internet still plays back in Firefox without issue. Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Twitter gifs, etc. This effects Vine and ONLY Vine.
- With regards to supported media formats, I can view a webm file directly in Firefox and it will play back just fine. For whatever reason, I cannot view an MP4 file in Firefox unless it's playing back through Flash (which is how Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. work)
- Vine, as far as I can tell, seems like it's using Flash. (Right-clicking a Vine brings up the "About Adobe Flash..." dialog)
- I can rip the MP4 video from Vine using DownloadHelper and it plays back in Windows without issue.
- Vines play back just fine in Google Chrome.
- I've tried whitelisting Vine in Adblock and NoScript, thinking that was the problem. No change. Tried disabling/uninstalling Adblock and NoScript. No change.
I figured it might be related to this problem I had last year:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/980491
This was another "Firefox won't play [X]" sort of problem, but reverting those settings, changing related settings, etc. doesn't change anything. Vines still do not play.
All Replies (3)
Oh, I figured I'd check the browser console and this comes up:
Specified "type" attribute of "video/mp4" is not supported. Load of media resource default.mp4 failed. OV0HVBmtvra All candidate resources failed to load. Media load paused.
For some reason it appears Vine is trying to play the MP4 using HTML5, and that's where it's getting hung up.
If the site tries to use the HTML5 player and DirectShow is disabled on Windows XP, then definitely it will fail. But even when you re-enabled DirectShow it still failed? I think you might need to exit and start Firefox back up again before that takes effect.
Also, hmm, if DirectShow was disabled, why didn't the site automatically fall back to Flash like other sites?
I did restart Firefox after re-enabling Directshow.
The weird part is, Vine does seem to be falling back on Flash. Like I said, right clicking the Vine player brings up Flash settings/information.
But it never starts playback. In fact, viewing a page directly on Vine.co is kind of broken in Firefox in general for me -- the "Related Vines" thumbnails that normally come up on the right-hand side of the page don't appear until I click "Like" and it asks me to sign in. Once the sign in overlay comes up, then the Related Vines thumbnails slide in to view under it like they're supposed to.
I tried to bring the issue up with Vine support, but Vine support doesn't actually exist -- it just redirects to Twitter support, and the support form only lets you choose between mobile devices. It seems they don't want to hear about their website not working on a desktop.
It's double baffling because they launched Twitter Video not too long ago, separate from Vine, and even that works for me. It's just Vine that's broken.