Streaming videos on IOS devices

Hello,

We are using the Videos content module of sitefinity in our 4.2 website, and flowplayer to display the videos on the front end pages, however, streaming the videos on IOs  devices (IPad, IPhone.. ) is not working properly, even if we paste the url of the video directly to the mobile browser, we get "Cannot Play Movie, The server is not correctly configured".

Why is this happending and is there any workaround for this issue? We face this issue in case of using both the Database and File System providers. We need to use the built-in module since it offers more meta data including the title, description, classifications,... and we don't want to store these files on the file system of the server as they will lose all their categorization features.

Thanks

Flowplayer is flash, are you using the iOS\iPad plugin for it so it will use the HTML5 player instead?

Hi Steve,

FlowPlayer has a fallback behavior to html5 and it is working perfectly as long as the mp4 is stored locally not through the videos module. We are having problems streaming an mp4 out of the videos module directly through the ios browser, we get "Cannot Play Movie, The server is not correctly configured".

So basiclly streaming videos directly works but not videos from the videos module regardless of the storage model (file or database).

Amr

Hi Amrelsayed,

I did some research and found out that this is rather an Apple issue. Here are some useful articles and forum threads that I found:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=724397

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2141381?threadID=2141381&tstart=0

I don't this is a Sitefinity issue. I also found this article - it looks like the video itself must be in a specific format so the iPhone/iPad plays it

http://www.metaltoad.com/blog/iphone-video-streaming-drupals-file-system

Hi Lubomir,

Thanks for the response though there seems to be some confusion over the source of the issue.

What we are saying is simply that video files that work 'perfectly' on apple devices 'stop' working when they hosted within the sitefinity videos module.

Actually the third link you mentioned from Metaltoad probably explains the issue within Sitefinity which is the lack of support for 'byte range requests', the link you mentioned suggests by-passing the transfer to Apache via the use of X-Sendfile module or in Windows terms would be to by-pass the file transfer to IIS. The questions is how do we do the same for Sitefinity?

To summarize the issue: mp4 Apple compliant files work when requested directly out of IIS but don't work when requested out of Sitefinity Videos Module.

What we need is a workaroud, httphandler, configuration tweek or code update to work around this problem.

Amr

Hello Amrelsayed,

I did some research and I found the following projects that implement X-Sendfile functionality for IIS:

https://github.com/stakach/IIS-X-Sendfile-plugin

http://www.helicontech.com/ape/

I hope they will be useful for you.

Hi Lubomir,

I appreciate the continued support, have you confirmed or consider this thread a Sitefinity bug where we can expect a proper built-in resolution in a future service pack?

Amr

Hi Amrelsayed,

I have logged a new PITS feature request for this - here is the public URL

http://www.telerik.com/support/pits.aspx#/public/sitefinity/8712

You can vote for it and if it gets enough votes it will be implemented.

Clicking on the link to the PITS issue does NOT take me to the issue (to vote for it or check-up on it).
Instead, it takes me to the main PITS page.  How can we get to this issue?
I tried searching for the ID but that didn't work either.

Clicking on the link to the PITS issue does NOT take me to the issue (to vote for it or check-up on it).
Instead, it takes me to the main PITS page.  How can we get to this issue?
I tried searching for the ID but that didn't work either.
(Even just posting this reply resulted in an error, although I see that the post was accepted!)

i posted about this exact issue back in april 2011. i cannot believe this has not been resolved already.

here's a post to my original thread on the issue. of course this was with version 3.x but we moved back to 4.1 shortly after all of these. neither worked.

http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/sitefinity-3-x/general-discussions/mp4-uploaded-to-image-document-library.aspx

i posted about this exact issue back in april 2011. i cannot believe this has not been resolved already.

here's a post to my original thread on the issue. of course this was with version 3.x but we moved back to 4.1 shortly after all of these. neither worked.

http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/sitefinity-3-x/general-discussions/mp4-uploaded-to-image-document-library.aspx

I know this is an old thread, but I too was at a point where this was an issue for one of our projects. I contacted Sitefinity about this to see if there was any new information but there really wasn't. Looking around the web I found a couple of solutions that seemed to work but the issue was getting the code implemented into the Sitefinity handler for the video library. With the help from Sitefinity support, I was able to implement some code into the library handler and was successful in getting videos from Sitefinity to play on mobile devices.

Hi Richard,

The link for the code is broken. Is there another link to your sample code. Also, have you received any information from Telerik whether they have fixed this problem in the Video library service?

Thanks,
-jm

Hello guys,

I believe this is the correct link to the post Brandon was talking about:

www.sitefinity.com/.../mp4-uploaded-to-image-document-library 

The PITS feature request has not been implemented yet. We're doing our best to keep Sitefinity up-to-date with your requirements and we're implementing the features, depending of the number of votes they collect. 

Jeffery,
    I guess I was doing some winter cleaning and removed the file from the directory. I have added it back in. The link to my code should be operational. I haven't looked at the link Jen provided, but this is my original working code. You just have to make sure your library is setup to save to the file system.

Just a note: This completely breaks Safari 6 on the desktop as well as breaking Safari on iOS, as Apple has made byte range requests mandatory for loads there as well (Likely due to QuickTime now requiring them, and it handling video loads).

Richard's little fix actually works... which means it shouldn't be too hard for Telerik to pull in those changes.

I'd say at this point, this issue really needs attention.

Hi guys,
i am encountering same issue: mp4 video served by Sitefinity won't play on IOS devices; on desktop browser it works.

I figure out that the problem is the lack of support for 'byte range requests' as some of you explained too.

Is there any news? Any solution?

Greatings,
Stefano
Codicezerouno

See Richard's post above. His modified LibraryHttpHandler is the best we have right now. And vote for the PITS issue.

I have a solution for this which uses a modified version of Richard's Library Handler. Anyone interested can send me an email to Jeffrey@mobmedia.com with the version you are looking for and I will send you the assemblies.

Cheers,
-jm

The proper PITS link is here

Hello,

All feature requests / bug reports are moved in our Feedback Portal.

Regards,
Vassil Vassilev
Telerik