Android 4.2 without Flash support showing "No playable sources found"
I am using jw player 6.2 (pro) and my stream server provides a stream in rtmp and HLS format. Both work as expected on platforms such as normal web browsers with flash and iOS devices. Unfortunately an Android 4.2 device without flash support shows "No playable sources found" but it could play back the HLS stream by just entering the URL of the m3u8 playlist file. Why does jw player not make use of the HLS stream?
Hm... well it neither works with Android devices having a flash plugin.
Now I added the video tag - but it only works with Android 4 devices and still Android 2.3 devices show nothing. Why isn't that autodetected correctly by the jw player java script code?
Android does support HLS very well beginning from version 3 - see http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-3.0-highlights.html
HTTP Live streaming
Applications can now pass an M3U playlist URL to the media framework to begin an HTTP Live streaming session. The media framework supports most of the HTTP Live streaming specification, including adaptive bit rate.
Unfortunately Android does not support HLS reliably (and the few versions where it was supported, it caused unpredictable serious issues regularly). This is why we do not support HLS on Android altogether until the device support is there I’m afraid.
To be more specific: on Android 2.3-4.0 HLS could sometimes work with Flash, but not all devices had the right version of Flash installed, and performance tended to be pretty abysmal, and given that Adobe has stopped supporting Flash on Android, the Flash player cannot be installed or upgraded any longer altogether.
On Android 3.0 (some devices 3.1)-4.0 the devices did support native HTML5 HLS playback in the default browser (but we still saw occasional crashes and hangs).
On Android 4.1 and up Google changed the default browser of Android to Chrome. Chrome does not support HLS playback in the HTML5 video tag.
Unfortunately there is nothing we can do here, the ball is in Google’s court I’m afraid.
I just tried a Galaxy Nexus with 4.2 and it seems they fixed most of the issues. Clearly this will not hit the majority of the Android devices for now but jw player could support at least them. It's really a shame that only iPhone users should be able to view live streams. Google should have added HLS much earlier as they have a market share of >70%