IE8 - Flash Fallback buffers entire video before it starts to play
We are working on this site:
http://business.responsiblebynature.com/rebate-programs/heating-eff...
We are serving up h.264 MP4s and Ogg video files.
Everything works flawlessly in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc.
The only problem is IE8. It can take forever for the videos to start to play, because it seems as if it is buffering the entire video before it starts playing. We've been trying to figure this out for a week, trying everything we can think of, or is mentioned in this forum.
What we've done so far:
- specified MIME types on the server - tried different compression
levels (smaller files load proportionally faster) - added "quick
start"/web video options to video encoder - tested a local version
of the swf and js - experimented with relative versus absolute
urls
Is there anything else that we can do? Is this just a function
of the backup flash player, or can the buffering/caching be
configured?
Can we use a different flash player? Do we need to enable streaming
somehow?
Thanks.
2 Posted by dthomas on 21 Feb, 2012 08:01 PM
Another note, the demo video always plays beautifully (and immediately) but no other video I try does.
3 Posted by mglhm on 22 Feb, 2012 03:34 PM
I have the same problem. It does not start playing until the whole clip is loaded. This is not only for IE8. Same for Firefox with flash fallback.
4 Posted by dthomas on 22 Feb, 2012 08:26 PM
I solved the problem. It turns out that even though we set our batch to encode our MP4s with "Fast Start/Web Optimized", they weren't.
We re-encoded and the problems disappeared.
5 Posted by Salman on 03 Apr, 2012 11:49 AM
Same problem here. The flash fallback used in IE does not play the video at all until all of the video is downloaded. The video I am using was provided by another party.
I myself use ffmpeg/ffmpeg2theora to convert videos at times. So is there some setting I need to specify to make the videos (MP4, WEBM and OGV) bufferable?
6 Posted by dthomas on 03 Apr, 2012 06:54 PM
Check to see if the video was encoded with quick-start enabled.
To check, open the file in a text editor, (or in terminal do a 'head').
If "moov" appears in the first few "words" then quick-start is enabled. If not, you'll need to reencode it.
You can do this by opening in quicktime 7 pro and reexporting, or by using any number of encoding utilities.
7 Posted by Salman on 04 Apr, 2012 06:37 AM
@dthomas: after a little research I used a tool called "qt-faststart.exe" to "fix" the videos. I then compared the two videos and found that the moov appears near the beginning in the fixed video.
I am currently testing the videos. The quick start trick appears to work at the moment :)