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html5 and m4v files

I'm trying to test the html5 player and I'm having problems with it. Whenever the file extension is .m4v, it defaults to the flash player. I can only get the html5 player to work if I rename the extension to .mp4. Since all of our current video files and links are of m4v videos, I can't rename all of them. I've tried setting the codec type in the code but it doesn't seem to help. I've also downloaded the bunny video that longtail uses and tried it with that, just so I know it isn't a problem with the video file. Any ideas on getting the html5 player to work with a m4v extension?

9 Community Answers

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Ethan Feldman

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

M4V files will work with the HTML5 player, as long as the file is encoded in H.264

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JW Player

User  
0 rated :

Hi Ethan,

The video file I'm using is from the html5 demo page on your website (which is in h.264). It was named bunny.mp4 but I renamed it to bunny.m4v for testing.

I've gotten the player to work fine for .mp4 videos but if I change the code to .m4v then the Flash player loads instead.

You can check my test page here: http://wwwappskc.lonestar.edu/cgi/video/html5/index.html

Thanks for your help.

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Ethan Feldman

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

Hi Eddie,

You can’t just rename a file from .mp4 to .m4v, that isn’t going to work. You need to actually re-encode the file into .m4v.

Best,
-Ethan

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JeroenW

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

Actually, that’s not true. MP4 and M4V are exactly the same, like .JPG and .JPEG.

We’ll look into why files with M4V extension aren’t played. It could be we hardcoded the extension (incorrectly) to Flash, but it could also be the browser refuses m4v files. Which one did you test?

We ask a browser if it can play a video using the video.canPlayType(mimetype) javascript call, and perhaps a browser refuses video/m4v but accepts video/mp4

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JeroenW

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

BTW, you can track progress of this issue on our developer site:

http://developer.longtailvideo.com/trac/ticket/953

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JW Player

User  
0 rated :

Ok, I encoded my own video with Handbrake in h.264 as a .m4v and it still loads the Flash player.

Here is a different example. If I load a page that references a mp4 file, the html5 player loads. (http://wwwappskc.lonestar.edu/cgi/video/html5/fake_mp4.html)

But if I load a page that references a m4v file, then the flash player loads. (http://wwwappskc.lonestar.edu/cgi/video/html5/fake_m4v.html)

In these examples, neither video actually exists so it can't be a video codec/encoding problem. Are there any LongTail examples that use m4v?

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JW Player

User  
0 rated :

Oops, I must not have refreshed the page before I commented again... I didn't see the other comments. Sorry.

I'm using Chrome 5 Beta and Safari 4.0.5 to test it. Neither one will use the html5 player for m4v files.

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JW Player

User  
0 rated :

I am noticing the same problem. If I have a video that is a mp4 extension it's shows the HTML5 version of the player, but If I show a video with an M4V extension, then it falls back to flash and on the iPad, it crashes safari.

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Ethan Feldman

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

Can you provide a link to where you are running this?

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