Please post a link to your site with a video that doesn’t play.
Thread Starter
lenaw
(@lenaw)
Thanks for your quick reply.
Here you can see both the sample video and one of my videos: http://crespo-widl.at/taiwan/?p=475&preview=1&_ppp=19c1c12a06
As mentioned above, in the settings page of the plugin, the sample video works.
There are a couple different issues going on here. I don’t see anything wrong with that page in Chrome, but Firefox has some trouble. Sometimes it plays, sometimes it’s just a black screen. What browser are you using?
Your video is encoded with the moov atom at the end of the file, so it can’t play until the whole file has downloaded. This tends to be a problem for the Flash player. What program are you using to encode the video?
What is the shortcode you’re using to embed that sample video? There’s a strange blank space in the code where the width should be.
Whenever something plays in the Admin area but not in the frontend it means something your theme is doing is interfering with the player. In the past when I’ve seen these problems with Firefox there was a JavaScript conflict. So far I haven’t been able to isolate it though. You might want to try the WordPress Default player instead of Video.js. You can switch to it on the plugin settings page.
Thread Starter
lenaw
(@lenaw)
Hi Kyle,
Thanks for looking into the problem.
I have tried with Firefox 23.0 and Chromium 28.0 and neither of them plays the videos. I have fixed the blank in the width, but it doesn’t change anything.
The shortcode for embedding the sample video is
[KGVID width="640" height="427"]http://crespo-widl.at/taiwan/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/sample-video-h264.mp4[/KGVID]
(Adding the video through the “add media” button in fact left the width blank. I added it manually.)
I used openshot 1.4.0 to encode the video. The chosen settings were
Target: MP4 (h.264)
Video Profile: DV/DVD PAL (I don’t know what this means and just chose the default)
Quality: Low
I have tried using the wordpress default player, but I get the same behaviour.
I will now change the theme and see if this changes anything.
Thread Starter
lenaw
(@lenaw)
Update: changing the theme to “twenty twelve” (a pre-installed theme) doesn’t help.
Chromium differs from Chrome in a few important ways. One of them is that it doesn’t have built-in H.264 playback so it’s going to have the same problems as Firefox.
Something strange is going on with that sample video you added to the media library. It might be pointing us in the wrong direction. I set up a page with the Sample video in your uploads folder using both Video.js and the built-in WordPress player. It shows up blank in Firefox. Below those two is the video from the plugins folder which appears to work fine. http://www.kylegilman.net/dev/2013/10/06/video-plugin-test/
Let’s forget about the sample video for a little while and try to fix the videos you actually want to use. I don’t know Openshot very well, but it appears to use FFmpeg to encode videos, which usually means you get what you have which is a moov atom at the end of the mp4 instead of the beginning. If you run qt-faststart (which you might already have. It’s distributed with FFmpeg) on the file it should help you out.
Thread Starter
lenaw
(@lenaw)
That’s weird – none of the videos on your link work for me, neither in Firefox nor Chromium. So you say that the original (i.e. from plugins folder) sample video in your link works in your browser?
Still, in my plugin settings page, the sample video (which is the same as you put on your link, if I understand correctly) works fine in both browsers and both using video.js and WordPress Default. Just outside the settings page it doesn’t. I’m not sure if it’s the theme’s fault, because I tried with a WordPress default theme.
As for my openshot encoded video, I ran qt-faststart on it, but the result stays the same. No play in neither of the combinations video.js, WordPress Default, Firefox, Chromium. It’s here, on the bottom: https://crespo-widl.at/taiwan/?p=475&preview=1&_ppp=139c6908e9
Chromium doesn’t support H.264 playback any better than Firefox does. The problems you’ll see in Firefox should be the same as the problems you’ll have in Chromium because both of them use Flash to play H.264 videos. Chrome does support native playback of H.264, so it’s a more useful test for web video.
I don’t know how I missed this before, but your video has AC3 audio which is frequently a problem. You should re-encode it to use AAC.
Thread Starter
lenaw
(@lenaw)
Hi again,
I re-encoded it to use AAC, but also to no avail.
https://crespo-widl.at/taiwan/?p=475&preview=1&_ppp=4c9787d87b
So if it works with Chrome but not with Firefox/Chromium, that means that it’s a Flash issue?
There are many options to create a video in openshot. Maybe there’s something still wrong with the encoding. Maybe you have some advice on what option to choose in for the following attributes. I am listing the ones I chose for the encoding, maybe something is wrong here.
Profile: DV/DVD NTSC
——————–
Width: 720
Height: 480
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 29.97
Pixel ration: 8:9
Progressive: no
Image sequence settings
———————–
Image format: png
Video settings
————–
Video format: mp4
Video codec: libx264
Bit rate/quality: 384 kb/s
Audio settings
————–
Audio code: aac
Sample rate: 44100
# of Channels: 2
Bit rate/quality: 96 kb/s
Thank you for your support!
