Videos Won’t Play – JW Player, Internet Explorer, HTML5

We recently upgraded a site to use the HTML 5 playback functionality of JW Player.  We set the player default to HTML5 with ‘fallback’ to flash.  Things were working wonderfully until a couple of clients told us they were getting the following problem:

The video could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported:

It turns out the error occured in Internet Explorer (I tested in IE 9 and experienced the problem), only – we didn’t seem to have the issues in Chrome, Firefox, on our iOS devices or on our android devices….

Internet Explorer & JW Player

The videos have an extension of .m4v (not .mp4), are hosted on Amazon S3 and we are using JW Player to display them on the site.   Initially I thought there was a problem with the initial rendering of the videos however, my understanding of the m4v format is that it’s Apple’s video file format, that closely resembles mp4 – the only real difference is that m4v allows the use of Apples DRM…. so I didn’t really think that was the answer.

After much digging around and a bit of testing, I found the issue to be “content type” http headers, the way Internet Explorer has implemented certain parts of the standards and the method that you use to upload videos to your Amazon S3 buckets.

This podcast explains how to fix the issue on Amazon S3.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:08 — 10.2MB)

Content types for Internet Explorer and JW Player

m4v is not the only video format that can be set.  Here is a list of other Video Content Types (although there may be more).

• video/mp4
• video/mpeg
• video/quicktime
• video/x-flv
• video/x-m4v
• video/x-ivf
• video/x-la-asf
• video/x-ms-asf
• video/x-msvideo
• video/x-sgi-movie

Implementing this fix resolved the issue, I hope it does for you too.