MP4 videos in Flowplayer does not play in Windows 7 Chrome

Question

I have used the licensed version of FlowPlayer 5.3.2 to play an encoded video in mp4 format. In almost all the browsers it plays without any hiccup but it does not play in the latest version of Chrome 28.0.1500.95m (to date 13-08-2013) on Windows 7. I'm loading the player to the page upon a button click using AJAX. This happens only in Chrome for Windows. I am triggering the following function on a button click and pops up the light box and loads the player using AJAX inside it.

function playVideo() {
    var url1 = 'http://example.com/dashboard/play_video';
    var url = 'http://s3.amazonaws.com/xxxxxxxxx/xxxxxx.mp4?413142680';
        $.ajax({
            url: url1,
            type: 'post',
            data: 'url=' + url,
            success: function(data) {
                var toolbox1 = $("#how_to_make_video").html();
                $("#video_preview2").html(data + toolbox1);
                $("#video_preview2").dialog({
                    width: 700,
                    height: 500,
                    close: function(event, ui) {
                        $(".flowplayer").stop();
                    }
                });

                if (url.indexOf("s3.amazonaws.com") !== -1) {
                    $(".flowplayer").flowplayer({splash: true,
                        rtmp: "rtmp://" + userStream + "/cfx/st",
                        swf: "/site/js/flowplayer/flowplayer.swf"
                    });
                } else {
                    $(".flowplayer").flowplayer({splash: true,
                         swf: "/site/js/flowplayer/flowplayer.swf"
                    });
                }
            }
        });
    }

This is the same function that is used to play in all the other browsers. But when playing videos using this, the player shows an error "html5: Video not properly encoded" first and then automatically changes it to "html5: Video file not found". When the video URL "url" in above code is pasted in Chrome's address bar it does not play either. But it plays in other browsers on other platforms.

Is it a problem with the latest version of Chrome or the video?

Colin Bacon Colin Bacon · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-16T08:38:56

I would look at how your MP4 video is encoded as several formats of video and audio can be wrapped in an .mp4 container.

There is a good post from Mozilla on Media formats supported by HTML It states

The MP4 container format with the H.264 video codec and either the AAC audio codec or the MP3 audio codec is natively supported by Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome, but Chromium and Opera do not support the format.

Also this SO answer states:

Chrome can play .mp4 with H-264 video but not MPEG-4 Visual video.

If you want to cover all browsers you really need two formats, MP4 and WebM

MP4 videos in Flowplayer does not play in Windows 7 Chrome

1 Answers