Please provide a link to a page on your site where we can see this. Thanks.
Thank you so much for the hasty reply. The site is of an adult nature, I’m not sure if it would be a violation of the terms of use to post it here. Can I PM it to you? Let me know. Thank you again.
Ok, let’s leave it then.
Mobile devices are pretty picky about videos. What plugin are you using to serve them and what format(s) are the files that don’t work.
Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
Try uploading the video to your server in the root of WordPress.. I.e next to the ‘wp-config.php’ file. Then view that video directly by going to http://example.com/your-video.file (example). Does it work then? If it doesn’t then it’s nothing to do with WordPress.
@sterndata – No plugin, I’m just using the embed video block. It’s the default WordPress player. The video files are MP4.
@anevins – Okay I’ll try that.
Thanks a lot for the help everyone.
Mp4 is just the file format. It’s also important what encoder is used for the audio and video stream.
But yes, this is probably not a WordPress issue.
@anevins – Okay I tried what you said, it’s working fine that way.
A quick google search reveals that I’m not the only one having this problem.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b&q=wordpress+videos+not+playing+on+mobile
Is this not a relatively known issue? I really don’t want to embed videos from a third party site. If we could figure this out I would be extremely grateful. Thank you so much for the help thus far.
@tobifjellner
@anevins
Actually hold on I lied it doesn’t work on mobile that way. If I access the file directly in the way Andrew recommended, it says “unsupported video codec”. Does that help?
Sorry for the triple post, but through some research and your comments, I think I’m getting to the bottom of this issue. Apparently not all HD MP4 videos are the same. How they are rendered and with what codecs (like what tor-bjorn said) have an effect on what players can play them. For some reason mobile phones can’t play this type of MP4. This means that I can possibly render it in another format and it will play fine.
Where I’m still confused is why are the videos working on all devices and platforms if I embed from a third party site like YouTube or Vimeo? What are those players doing to allow the video to be played on mobile that the stock WP player is not doing, and can it be configured to do that?
Also, I’m using a professional editing program to render the videos in H.264. Shouldn’t that type of video be able to play on mobile as it is the most popular video format? Thanks again for your help.
YouTube and Facebook are very much aware of these peculiarities. When you upload a video to their platform, they’ll crunch it through and create more than 10 different screen sizes and encodings, in order to serve the right stuff to every visitor.
You can transcode video for instance with Avidemux. Perhaps you can use the html5 video tags that allow you to specify alternative source encodings, so that the browser can select.
@tobifjellner – Gotchya. I’m rendering using Adobe Premiere Pro. I checked some threads on their subreddit and they mentioned if you render in H.264 (MP4) and use the YouTube preset, it will play on pretty much anything. I’m gonna try it when I get home from work, hope it doesn’t slash the quality too much.
Thank you and everyone else for pointing me in the right direction to find the answers. Going to mark as resolved.
Thanks boyos.
***Edit*** For those of you experiencing the same issue, the problem is mobile phones and tablets can’t play videos that are of such high quality. It needs to be slashed down which sites like YouTube and Vimeo do for you. However, if you render in a different format or use the proper preset in your video editing program (for example the YouTube preset in Premiere Pro), the video should work across most if not all platforms. Good luck!
