Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Win-XP

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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

In about:config, right-click anywhere and choose New > String. Copy this into the first box:

general.useragent.override

Then copy the desired UA into the second box:

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

Edit: note that if this does work, it should only be considered a temporary solution. Eventually after a few versions, "spoofing" the UA string can have detrimental effects on browser compatibility with websites and the preference should be Reset to delete it.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

For me at least, UA string hacking doesn't change the fact that Twitter delivers HTML5 video content in mp4 format. In fact, the only fuss it makes is if I change the UA to IE9 or below and then it brings up the ancient "mobile" version of Twitter and shows an error saying the video cannot be played. Poking around I found this: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169327# Twitter doesn't even care if I tell it I'm using Firefox 2.0. Presumably it is only checking the UA string for IE9 and below and for EVERYTHING ELSE, it's now delivering h264 video via HTML5.

Since IE9's HTML5 video support was a bit broken, Twitter's complete lack of support for IE9 and below leads me to believe that Twitter has (quietly) completely removed Flash content. Going to check SM 2.33 real quick.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

OK. Same story on SM 2.33. I'm seeing HTML5 video mp4 content on video. Disabling h264 support in about:config (to simulate XP) and leaving only Flash and WebM, video fails on Twitter. It must just be a coincidence that they did this around the same time as SeaMonkey updated, because older versions now no longer work without h264.
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therube
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by therube »

(The older day I fired up an elderly version of SeaMonkey, didn't work.

And this has remained the same, at least since the beginning part of this year:

What video formats do you support?

We currently support MP4 and MOV video formats on mobile apps.

On the web, we support the MP4 video format with H264 format with AAC audio. You can upload videos up to 512MB, however you will be prompted to edit videos to 30 seconds or less in length.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20 ... eo-formats)
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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SeaMonkey/2.0.14 Pinball CopyURL+ FetchTextURL FlashGot NoScript
webmoebius
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by webmoebius »

If anyone is running on Win-XP and has the latest version of Google Chrome installed and can confirm they can play Twitter MP4 videos, I'd be interested to hear of a confirmation of this so I'll know there's a codec for it built into Chrome. Thanks.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by James »

Lemon Juice wrote: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?

Not working on my 64-bit Linux install whether on Firefox 42.0b9 or SeaMonkey builds. Not sure how long Twitter videos has been mp4 however I remember on my old PC with 32-bit Linux I could play twitter videos then before May.

hmm Firefox 42.0b9 does not work at http://www.html5videoplayer.net/html5vi ... ideo-test/ even with a new blank profile.

Do not have Chrome installed this time and not about to just for this.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

webmoebius wrote:I'd be interested to hear of a confirmation of this so I'll know there's a codec for it built into Chrome. Thanks.


Chrome has shipped with the codec since version 3.0. A few years ago they were talking about removing support for h264, but it's pretty obvious that that is not the current course of action due to lower performance of WebM at this point.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by James »

James wrote:
Lemon Juice wrote: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?

Not working on my 64-bit Linux install whether on Firefox 42.0b9 or SeaMonkey builds. Not sure how long Twitter videos has been mp4 however I remember on my old PC with 32-bit Linux I could play twitter videos then before May.

hmm Firefox 42.0b9 does not work at http://www.html5videoplayer.net/html5vi ... ideo-test/ even with a new blank profile.

Do not have Chrome installed this time and not about to just for this.

Ok now the video-test and twitter videos are working fine for me now in Firefox and SeaMonkey after all this time. Might have been due to a couple gstreamer updates I did.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by webmoebius »

patrickjdempsey wrote:Chrome has shipped with the codec since version 3.0. A few years ago they were talking about removing support for h264, but it's pretty obvious that that is not the current course of action due to lower performance of WebM at this point.


Interestingly, I noticed that within the last couple of weeks some newly posted Twitter videos have started to support Flash playback again, so it's possible that Twitter is coming around to address this problem. Older Twitter posts with MP4 still do not play, but perhaps at least going forward Flash fall back is starting to be supported.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

It's possible someone posted a link to a Flash video, and sometimes Vine uses Flash, but videos uploaded directly to Twitter are h264 HTML5 only as far as I can tell. Do you have a link?
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by webmoebius »

patrickjdempsey wrote:It's possible someone posted a link to a Flash video, and sometimes Vine uses Flash, but videos uploaded directly to Twitter are h264 HTML5 only as far as I can tell. Do you have a link?


I don't have the link now, but tonight I also noticed some recent posts (i.e. posted in the last couple of weeks) which are obviously videos and have the play triangle icon in the middle of the image, would immediately turn into an animated GIF a split second after I scroll to it. In fact, the bottom left corner of the image then explicitly says "GIF". I think Twitter is starting to implement workarounds for MP4 video posts that are displayed on Win-XP systems or systems where the browser reports that it's unable to playback and Twitter then serves it up as an animated GIF instead. If these are indeed workaround intentions, probably over time the issue raised in this thread will be tolerable or minimal for Win-XP users.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by patrickjdempsey »

1. What are you trying to show here? Examples of videos that work on XP or don't work?

2. That first link just has links to off-site Flash videos.

3. The other links all appear to be MP4s, although admittedly I didn't go through all of them because why would I do that? We've already established that Twitter only serves MP4 content.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by i4004 »

patrickjdempsey wrote: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
it depends on how do you read that blog post by occallahan. but here's how i read it:
"we don't care about few %s of xp users".
and that's it. :)

to break it down further
1-since that time firefox has lost a lot of users so their talk about open formats means zilch. that failed (and that was their main excuse)
2-they essentially say nobody (or very small numbers of people) on xp ever played h264 because it's not bundled with os. that's utter nonsense. it's as if in 2009 he didn't notice flash needed to be dloaded and installed. just like ffdshow.
3-there were never that many dshow h264 decoders. "rich APIs of video"? give me a break, flash video was flash video and is flash video even today. just like h264. it's not interactive or anything. just one more excuse, because if you put few on top of another, it makes more sense! #-o
4-many flash versions spread malware, and no dshow codecs were malware. malware is malware and it can present itself as anything (these days it's usually flash and java "videos" that spread most malware, paradoxically), that has nothing to do with dshow decoders.
5-there we go again! like flash didn't have holes and it's still most prevalet way to play video on the web.
6-just lazy

it is interesting that this decision boils down to preferences (or excuses) of one programmer.

and this
"Currently no browser or browser plugin vendor is using codec implementations they don't control."
man....how the hell can this man be in charge of anything... #-o
(i'll post this there on his blog too)

and oh yeah, special greetings to ms who's just re-labeling their os' to be able to sell something new, even if every new incarnation of windows has nothing new....heh
(i know, i'm the one cleaning them from malware)
and it's REALLY interesting to see that many video players (pot player by daum, mpc-hc, gretech gom player etc.) that bundle codecs acutally use same thing that ffdshow used, ie ffmpeg code....hehe....a history has a way of laughing at stupid ideas, or stupid excuses in this case, ff decoders obviously are good enough.
(and windows media player always was and will be junk for anybody into video)

so overall it's just laziness and poor predictions of what will future bring.

this also serves as a reminder that video was never really truly solved on the web, even since old days of realvideo, windows media video etc. there never was one format that was good eneough for everybody, and that's a pitty. because mpeg-la should (for example) give away these things for free (they essentially are free, they won't make money on windows or linux video decoders), OR price it at some very low price so that anybody can buy it.
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Re: Seamonkey 2.35 - Twitter video playback failure under Wi

Post by wyxchari »

- WXP + Firefox + H264 (vídeos de twitter..) no se reproducen.

- about:config
- media.gmp-eme-adobe.forcevisible = true
- media.gmp.decoder.enabled = true
- media.gmp-eme-adobe.enabled = true (ya estaba)

- Firefox, Menú, Complementos, Herramientas, Buscar actualizaciones. Esto hace que se instale automáticamente el plugin "Módulo de descifrado de contenido Primetime proporcionado por Adobe Systems, Incorporated" versión 17

Vídeo de muestra: https://twitter.com/llaneroVen/status/7 ... 5388252160
http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html
https://html5test.com/
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