Videos not playing on IPad

Hi Joshua, I have asked an engineer to look into this.

Hi Joshaua, Just FYI, your video played fine on my Ipad and on a 3G connection. If you need me to test more just let me know.

On my Ipad (first generation), the video play button doesn't even show up. I only see the snapshot. Clicking anywhere on the video doesn't do anything. What else can I test here?

Does this problem occur on all videos, or only on older videos. I will look into this more on Tuesday, as I will need the company iPad which is in our office and Monday is a bank holiday for us.

There seems to be no to the relation to the age of the video.

This is very strange, it works for me too on a first gen iPad, although in some cases I have to mash the play button a couple of times before it starts playing, as if at first not everything has loaded correctly yet, or maybe something else is interfering. We are going to change our HTML5 embed method significantly in a couple of months. It is very well possible that this will help with this issue too.

I'm having a similar problem, albeit I've made some tweaks to the player's presentation on our homepage. Videos seem to play in the iPhone, but require ~ a lot ~ of "mashing" as you mention, Remco, before they play on the iPad, and more often than not, as Joshua's problem seems to be, no amount of mashing gets the video to play. I wonder if this is an issue of ontouch vs. mouseover event handlers?

I don't think this is possible; our player embeds throw a plain <video> tag right now, so we use all the play buttons etc. from the iPad media handler, with no interface code on our hand, so it seems that the iOS media handler is bugging out for some reason.

Is there any other solution here? It seems that if BOTR claims to support Ipad/Iphone, it should work no matter what.

I looked at your example page again and I have noticed that as long as I wait a couple of seconds after the page has loaded, the video will play after only one press on the play button, but this can take a couple of seconds before it actually starts playing.

I suspect that the following is the case: before a media player can start playing back a video it will have to download a large block of metadata that is at the beginning of the video that is called the "moov object". This large block of metadata contains all the seeking information and more information about how the video is structured. This object will get larger for longer videos, so it can easily take some time to download, especially on slower wifi/cellular connections.

This issue is innate to how the mp4 file format is structured. In the longer run we plan to look into using the Apple HLS standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming) which can be used for on-demand video too, but this is still in a "let's do this at some point" phase.

Well on my iPad it won't play videos on safari and the YouTube app won't open, like it will just quit it's self... Help

If the YouTube app won't open either it sounds like there is an issue with your iPad rather than with our player. I'm afraid that type of issue isn't something we can support.

I'm having this same problem with videos not playing on the iPad. After the play button is pressed it's just a frozen frame. It also takes quite a long time for thumbnails to load in the first place.

These are longer videos, 1hr (1gb+) which would be the bulk of our enterprise content.

We noticed in final cut there are compression settings for h.264 that perhaps would assist in videos loading faster.

Outside of compression I'm hoping there is a BOTR side solution.

Here is the test site: http://www.studiodatura.com/Studio_Datura/Test.html

On our (quite quick) internet connection everything loads reasonably quick on the iPad and the videos play too. It can take a while for the video to get ready to play though, as before the video can play, the iPad has to download a big chunk of the file that contains all the seekpoints of the video, which can take a while for hourlong videos.

Because of that we're currently working to update the HTML5 fallback to a full featured JW player instead of a basic HTML5 video tag. That way the player will not try to access the video until the play button is actually pushed. This should improve thumbnail loading time.

We're also working to implement streaming small chunks of the video at a time to the iPad. This should improve the actual start time of the video. I cannot promise when this will be implemented exactly, but this should also be done before then end of the year from the looks of it.