Video doesn't play on iPhone5

This is so frustrating. You know the phone can play the video, and it certainly will in any other app, but using mobile Safari it won’t play most likely because it’s not an .mp4 file. If you can change the filename to .mp4 before uploading it might work fine. I’ve also seen people have problems because the iPhone used capital letters for the extension (.MOV rather than .mov).

If renaming doesn’t work or isn’t possible, since you have FFMPEG on your server, you can just re-encode the video. Use the “Replace original with same resolution H.264” option and that should fix it.

Hi Kyle,

Even doing as you say, where the video seems to end up in the media library as a .mp4 file, and displays properly on desktop, will not display on mobile.

Here’s a screenshot of my settings.

I have also tried unticking everything except for the replace original with H.264 with the same result.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thannks – Mark

Can you post a link to a page with this problem? I’ll try to troubleshoot it on my own devices.

Thanks again for your support Kyle,

https://bilbycare.com.au/test/snapshot/test-12/

Cheers – Mark

Do you have some sort of password protection on your media? If I try to load the video directly I’m redirected to the WordPress login page.

Hi again,

By default my media files are protected. This does not seem to be relevant to the issue as when I am logged in and can access the media I get the same result.

I have unprotected the media on the post in the link above and can play the video directly using the media url on the desktop and on my mobile! But when I try viewing the post on the mobile I get the error: Error loading this resource.

Its like the player is not working ion the mobile.

https://bilbycare.com.au/test/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2016/07/capturedvideo-5.mp4

Thanks again,
Mark.

Hi Again,

I just tried inserting the video without using the [KGVID] tags and it works on mobile:

https://bilbycare.com.au/test/snapshot/test-13/

This is weird as I have the player setting set to Default in the Video Playback Settings.

Could there be a setting somewhere else that is overriding this setting?

I’ll keep looking/

Mark

You’ve unprotected the full resolution file, which is probably why it’s working using the [video] shortcode, but I still can’t play the video on page test-12 in any broswer because it’s trying to load the 360p version of the video which is still password protected.

Hi again Kyle,

I updated the Test 12 post to use the unprotected file. The path to the media file in test 12 and Test 13 are the same.

[video src="https://bilbycare.com.au/test/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2016/07/capturedvideo-5.mp4" /]

The only difference is the [KGVID] tag is used in 12 whereas in 13 the source URL is included in the post content without any tags.

Thanks – Mark

Hi Again,

Sorry for being a bit of a headache and thanks again for the help.

OK I can see that test 12 won’t load on any browser. Test 13 does load on mobile and desktop. I dont think it is a protection issue as both posts use the same URL for the video file.

In any case I can only see one file in the media library. Is there any way to access the other files via the media library? When I unprotect the file, it is moved to a different directory and the meta for that file is updated to reflect the new path. Perhaps this is only happening for one of the files and the others are remaining in the protected directory?

All my users are members with access to the protected directories so it may not be such a big deal. Its really just for the purpose of troubleshooting this player issue that I am trying to provide unprotected media.

Is there a way I can easily keep the other functions of the plugin without it automatically using the [KGVID] tags when the insert media button is used?

Thanks again –
Mark.

Hi Again,

I have just changed lines from 6259 in video-embed-thumbnail-generator.php to:

$html .= $kgvid_postmeta["url"];

/*      '[KGVID';
      if ( !empty($kgvid_postmeta['poster']) && empty($kgvid_postmeta['poster-id']) ) { $html .= ' poster="'.$kgvid_postmeta["poster"].'"'; }
      if ( !empty($kgvid_postmeta['width']) ) { $html .= ' width="'.$kgvid_postmeta["width"].'"'; }
      if ( !empty($kgvid_postmeta['height']) ) { $html .= ' height="'.$kgvid_postmeta["height"].'"'; }
      $html .= ']'.$kgvid_postmeta["url"].'[/KGVID]<br />';
*/

This has prevented any of the shortcoding on any of the inserted media, which seems to solve my problem. I know it is a total hack and I’d love to get to the bottom of the problem, but this serves for now. I don’t need fancy galleries etc.

Beautiful plugin.

Thanks again – Mark.

Ok – That didn’t work. AND I have worked out it totally does have to do with the protection system I have going. I mave a must use plugin that does the following:

add_filter('upload_dir', 'maxi_custom_upload_dir');

/**
 * Changes the upload directory to what we would like,
 * instead of what WordPress likes.
 */
function maxi_custom_upload_dir($upload) {

         $upload['path'] = $upload['basedir'] . '/_mediavault/'.current_time('Y'). '/' .current_time('m');
         $upload['url'] = $upload['baseurl'] . '/_mediavault/'.current_time('Y'). '/' .current_time('m');

    return $upload;
}

Could it be that when the video is encoded and replaced on upload it does not go into the expected directory?

Thanks again and sorry about the last few posts.

Ok, that’s good to know. It’s very possible that the files are ending up in the wrong place, although I think your filter should work fine. The plugin uses the $upload['path'] data from wp_upload_dir() in order to determine where to save files, and it tries to keep all encoded files in the same directory as the original file anyway.

If you can create a login for me ([email protected]) that will eliminate the variable of moving things out of your media vault.

The WordPress [video] shortcode doesn’t look in the database for any information about the provided URL, but mine does in order to find the multiple resolutions and formats. So the scenario I’m leaning towards is a mismatch between actual location and metadata. The thing to find out now is, what is the actual location of the files and what is the metadata telling us about the location of the files?

In the Media Library if you switch the drop down list near the top of the screen from “All media items” to “Video” you will see all of the various formats available and you can check their URLs. If one of those videos has the wrong URL that will point us towards a solution I hope.

Also, you appear to be using a multisite network. That makes everything harder and it’s something to keep in mind as we’re troubleshooting this.

Hi Kyle and sorry for the long delay in getting back to you.

I have done a bit more testing and found that it is the media-vault that is causing the problem with mobiles, but I need to use it and I can’t see what the problem is. Do you know why specifically a mobile browser would be having this problem? The media-vault plugin protects media by saving uploaded files to a specific directory in the wp-content folder. When an attachment located in that directory is requested by a browser, it redirects to …index.php?mgjp_mv_file={file name requested}, which checks if the user is logged in. If so, it inserts mgjp_mv_download=safeforce into the URL and then redirects the browser to the required file. If not a “protected” image is displayed. The .htaccess rewrite is:

# Media Vault Rewrite Rules
RewriteRule ^(?:[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-content/uploads(?:/sites/[0-9]+)?(/_mediavault/.*\.\w+)$ index.php?mgjp_mv_file=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(?:.*&)?mgjp_mv_download=safeforce(?:&.*)?$
RewriteRule ^(?:[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-content/uploads(?:/sites/[0-9]+)?(/.*\.\w+)$ index.php?mgjp_mv_file=$1 [QSA,L]
# Media Vault Rewrite Rules End

I have added you as a user with your email above. Reset password at https://bilbycare.com.au/test/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword. You could check out post at https://bilbycare.com.au/test/snapshot/v2/ on desktop and mobile to see the effect I am talking about.

I really appreciate any advice you can offer… Thanks.

It seems like iOS doesn’t play nice with this kind of authorization/redirect protection system specifically when working with the video player. It worked on my Android 6.0 device but not on any iOS 9.3 devices. I’ve seen lots of problems over the years with the video player not making the right requests for authorization. Have you asked the security plugin’s developer for help?