Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Win-XP

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webmoebius
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure

Post by webmoebius »

therube wrote:
Oh, you're on XP, & that might be the issue?

On XP now, & I get no video, only "This browser does not support video playback".


Thanks for confirming this on Win-XP. That's the error message I get. On certain other MP4 content pages on other web sites, I get the more usual message ""No video with supported format and MIME type found". I believe it's just that Twitter uses its own error message to convey the same issue. I think this is the first instance where the operating system has caused issues for me in web browser because I had always assumed that having the necessary plug-ins would handle all necessary content formats and make the browser OS-independent.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by TPR75 »

What if you'll use fake User Agent pretending that you're using e.g. Win7?

AFAIK DivX Web Player should work:
http://www.divx.com/en/software/web-player/features
... but right now I don't have access to PC with WinXP Pro on VirtualBox VM to check it.
Be careful during install and watch for "extras".
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

TPR75 wrote:What if you'll use fake User Agent pretending that you're using e.g. Win7?


The website already doesn't care what OS he's using or else they wouldn't be delivering h264 video to XP.

TPR75 wrote:AFAIK DivX Web Player should work:
http://www.divx.com/en/software/web-player/features
... but right now I don't have access to PC with WinXP Pro on VirtualBox VM to check it.
Be careful during install and watch for "extras".


Only as a player for a direct video link or as an embedded file requiring a plugin. The <video> tag is rendered by the browser and in the case of h264, Firefox hands it off to the OS codec, which XP does not have.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by Lemon Juice »

Interestingly, Firefox and SeaMonkey on Linux can use the codec provided by the OS. The twitter video plays fine in my Linux Mint in VM - of course without Flash. I wonder why the same can't be done in XP?
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

Old reading, but the facts haven't changed:
https://brendaneich.com/2012/10/html5-v ... ment-13220

This one is even older, and this comment outlines the reason why DirectShow is not being used for video, namely that it's not impossible but it's a huge security risk and maintenance headache. The situation is so bad that the developers have suggested that even if someone supplied a working patch they would not accept it. Note that this was right at the same time as the release of Windows 7. Remember that prior to wide adoption of Windows 7, Vista had been a flop and the vast majority of Windows users were running versions that didn't have codecs for h264 installed. After the success of Win7, and wider adoption of Windows versions that supported h264 directly, Mozilla started working on support for this through Media Foundation.
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2009/06/dir ... ia_23.html
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webmoebius
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure

Post by webmoebius »

patrickjdempsey wrote:Chrome ships with the h264 codec because Google is a very rich company and they own a stake in MPEG. For legal reasons Firefox doesn't ship with it.


Chrome for Windows installation might be the best solution for Win XP users that have perfectly useable / optimized systems. I won't consider moving to Win-7 just for the ability to playback one media format, when in fact most of the time that format already does play through other means or under different page coding situations (e.g. embed / direct file URL). Unfortunately, I think I read recently that Chrome will discontinue Win XP support soon by late 2015. Not sure if that means Chrome will ONLY work with Win-7 or later or that only security patches / updates for Chrome under Win-XP will be discontinued (which I personally don't care so much since I would only being using Chrome to playback <video> tagged MP4 content occasionally and then only on legitimate sites that have low to no real security risks).

Browser test for MP4 / H.264 video:
http://www.html5videoplayer.net/html5vi ... ideo-test/
rn10950
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by rn10950 »

I've been working on this issue on and off for a while now, since a streaming website I use was HTML5-based (they switched to Flash recently, so I haven't worked on it in a while), but apparently Gecko gets its h.264 ability from the OS. I have considered three solutions to this issue, but the only one I got working was Chrome. (not Chromium, only Google's build supports h.264 unfortunately) The other two was using VLC or CCCP for decoding or using the Cisco plugin that Firefox uses for Hello. (for some reason, it doesn't work on websites, only Hello) I checked Twitter out in Firefox 3.6 and Windows 98, but I get the same issue, so it seems that Twitter gutted the Flash player entirely. One thing I don't understand is why Twitter chose h.264, which is proprietary, over a more open format like webm that all browsers support.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

The Cisco plugin is very low resolution. There's talk of enabling it for advertisements, but it will likely never be good enough for fullscreen video.

The reason websites use h264 is because it is supported by the user majority of desktop browsers: IE, Chrome, and to the lesser degree Safari, and ALL mobile platforms iOS, Windows Phone, and Android. While the open codecs are only supported by Chrome and Firefox. Microsoft has just announced it will support WebM in the new Edge browser, but don't expect Apple to join the party any time soon.

Apparently the licensing situation is so bad for the next generation video: h265/HEVC, that Microsoft, Google, Intel, Mozilla and other companies have decided to throw in together on a next gen open codec. But that's years away.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/2/925275 ... tion-codec
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by therube »

CCCP

I've got CCCP on my XP (on all my machines actually) & it (at least alone) does nothing - for this issue.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by TPR75 »

therube wrote:
CCCP

I've got CCCP on my XP (on all my machines actually) & it (at least alone) does nothing - for this issue.


How about ffdshow?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow-tryout/
User must choose which application will use it (or all of them).
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by therube »

I do not have FFDShow (any longer).

The only time I had it was when CCCP installed it as part of their package, but the last time they included that was in their 2011-11-11 release (with current being 2014-07-13, [though they did just put out a new "beta", 2015-10-04 RC2]).
Fire 750, bring back 250.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

I guess I shouldn't even bother spending hours researching this stuff since you guys aren't even bothering to read the stuff I'm digging up. Firefox/SM doesn't use user-installed codecs on Windows PERIOD.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by therube »

(I understand that, but TPR asked, so I answered. No harm in that. Plus we like to go offtopic in our own little worlds ;-).)
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

Something to try: assuming that Twitter was serving up Flash video for older versions of SeaMonkey, perhaps it's possible to trick Twitter into serving up Flash again by changing the UA String to an older version?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0 SeaMonkey/2.32
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by webmoebius »

patrickjdempsey wrote:Something to try: assuming that Twitter was serving up Flash video for older versions of SeaMonkey, perhaps it's possible to trick Twitter into serving up Flash again by changing the UA String to an older version?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0 SeaMonkey/2.32


Could try that. Which about:config parameter is that stored in?
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