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I have searched around quite a bit but have not solved my problem.

I have a video tag running as follows:

  src="{{ page | video_url }}" 
  poster="{{ page | video_poster_image_url }}" 

I am using Jekyll for the urls. They work fine.

The site is live at swtizerlandllc.com. Click any video in FF and it shows an image and an X. Chrome and other browsers work fine.

If you grab the source of a video and load it in a new tab it plays fine. At least it does for me.

I have added:

AddType video/ogg .ogv
AddType video/mp4 .mp4
AddType video/webm .webm

to my htaccess file. I suspect that I don't need the .ogv or .webm

I don't understand why loading the video url will play the videos fine but loading the video into a video tag fails.

any ideas?

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3 Answers 3

up vote 24 down vote accepted

Firefox does not support the MP4 format within its video tag. The main reason why is the royalty fee attached to the mp4 format.

Check out Media formats supported by the audio and video elements directly from the Mozilla crew or the following blog post for more information:


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Direct from the source: developer.mozilla.org/En/… –  Sam Dufel May 7 '12 at 20:41
Thanks, I updated my answer with the link! –  Josh Mein May 7 '12 at 20:45
I have seen this answer around but then why does the video play if you load the path in a new tab? –  TJ Sherrill May 7 '12 at 20:55
I assume the issue is that in order to support mp4 in their video tag, the Firefox crew would have to pay for a license. Whereas, if the user just puts the link in the browser, they dont have to pay anything. –  Josh Mein May 7 '12 at 21:01
@TJSherrill, it is probably playing because of a Firefox plugin (like Quicktime). This doesn't mean it will work in a <video> element. –  MPD May 7 '12 at 21:24

Firefox 21 supports MP4 H.264 by default. Yay! Just try this video test - http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html

EDIT: FF21+ only on windows 7+ apparently. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Supported_media_formats

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I can confirm that mp4 just will not work in the video tag. No matter how much you try to mess with the type tag and the codec and the mime types from the server.

Crazy, because for the same exact video, on the same test page, the old embed tag for an mp4 works just fine in firefox. I spent all yesterday messing with this. Firefox is like IE all of a sudden, hours and hours of time, not billable. Yay.

Speaking of IE, it fails FAR MORE gracefully on this. When it can't match up the format it falls to the content between the tags, so it is possible to just put video around object around embed and everything works great. Firefox, nope, despite failing, it puts up the poster image (greyed out so that isn't even useful as a fallback) with an error message smack in the middle. So now the options are put in browser recognition code (meaning we've gained nothing on embedding videos in the last ten years) or ditch html5.

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+1 "Firefox is like IE all of a sudden, hours and hours of time, not billable." –  Geo Nov 6 '13 at 22:11
Which video type works? OGG, or WEBM? –  Jackson_Sandland Nov 16 at 23:44

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