Some user topics are not displaying the video playback as you would expect.
In all cases so far;
- audio can be heard
- video cannot be seen
- browsing to the embedded video URL prompts a download
- the downloaded MP4 file plays correctly locally (Windows)
- re-uploading the same file into the topic (with a different filename) changes nothing
- editing the video, inserting 1 second of “nothing” at the start, and re-uploading to the same topic resolves the issue possibly only because different codecs were used in the second recording
Raised with Discourse team on Meta;
Example topic;
The original video file from the above topic is this one;
Updated Tue Mar 06 2018 07:18
Responses so far suggest that this could be a codec issue. If this is the case then my re-recording of a users video previously and re-uploading it (with the 1 second empty space at the beginning) would explain why it resolved the problem. Different codecs were used, probably.
If this is the case, and I’m trying to ascertain if there is a way to determine solidly that it is, then you may want to start suggesting to students that they upload their videos to YouTube instead and then paste the link within their posts here, which will Onebox them.
It isn’t practical to try to “fix” every video that isn’t playing and students are likely to be disappointed after being told to upload a video of their work, only to find it doesn’t play.
@ben / @sampattuzzi / @Michael_Bridges / @Rick_Davidson
Updated Tue Mar 06 2018 09:38
I have re-recorded the video for Richard in the link above, which now plays correctly. The significant difference, is, as Jeff (Discourse) pointed out, the original video was using H.263, where-as the re-recorded version is using Advanced Video Coding, which I believe is H.264.
Posting to sites like Facebook and YouTube I believe resolves the issue because they re-encode the videos to another format after upload.
Updated Tue Mar 06 2018 13:35
Advice from another team member at Discourse is to not upload videos directly to Discourse, instead use a platform such as YouTube, pasting the URLs into posts instead. This puts the reliance on correct encoding to a more suitable platform and thus removes the problem from both the students or ourselves.
There is of course no guarantee that anything which has already been uploaded will still play as expected in <insert amount of time here> as technologies and browser support evolve further, where-as a platform such as YouTube would have to manage this issue.
The only downside I can initially see with this is that not all students may feel comfortable creating a YouTube account/channel in order to upload videos, whilst it’s not a massively complex process I could see this as a turn-off over just uploading to the forum.