It appears that JW Player 5.4 has a 2 GB limit in Firefox (v 3.6.14 and 3.6.15 with the latest flash installed 10.2.152.26). When I attempt to download a video that is more than 2 GB in size, it never plays, but continuously buffers. This happens on both Macs and Windows. I've tried multiple computers to make sure it wasn't just mine. I installed the httpfox add-on to see what was going on. It shows that the video is being downloaded. I let it fully download, and the animated buffering icon just turns to the play symbol, but the video never starts. The video plays fine from quicktime if using the /path/to/file.mp4?start=0 in the url. What's odd is that I can play the files fine from Firefox if I load the html page from my local hard drive, and not the web server. The videos stream fine from Internet Explorer and Safari, well except for Safari's hobbling of Flash causing choppy video.
I've created 2 test videos to demonstrate. Both were extracted from the same video using:
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:00.0 -t 01:11:00.0 -i /path/to/tmp.mp4 -acodec copy -vcodec copy -async 1 /path/to/test.mp4
Then again with the duration (-t) set to 01:12:00.0. The first video is exactly 2,130,246,938 bytes in size, and it plays fine. The second video is exactly 2,159,913,862 bytes, and it exhibits the problem. The original source video was encoded with the standard ffmpeg hq command:
ffmpeg -i /path/to/tsmuxed-camera-source.m2ts -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -b 4000k -deinterlace -flags +ilme -acodec libfaac -ab 96k -threads 0 /path/to/tmp.mp4
The tsmuxed-camera-source.m2ts file was created with tsMuxeR v 1.10.6, joining the ts files from an AVCHD stream folder. I'm using the H264 Streaming Module with Apache 2.2.
I'm not sure who in the software stack is to blame: Firefox, Adobe Flash, or JW Player, but I thought I would try here first.
The spam filter on this site will not let me post the link to the test videos. Please email me at jtriende (at) wisc (dot) edu if you would like to see them.