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How on earth to get .mov files to play on iOS products?


SJ77

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in downloads app for IPB I have some ".mov" video clips. Users can click download but they NEVER play on iphone or ipad.

it just goes right to a black play screen but never plays. (they can be large files in some cases)

Any ideas?

I really wish there was a way to stream video clips from my IPB community.

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The videos need to be transcoded (re-encoded) into the appropriate format (MP4 w/ H.264 and MP3/AAC audio will work in virtually every mobile/tablet device)

XenForo Media Gallery implemented this by allowing you to use an external application called FFMPEG on your web server which will automatically transcode incompatible videos. It's similar to how YouTube and Vimeo process their videos on upload to ensure compatibility.

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/updated-media-tagging-video-uploads-and-more.101440/
(see section Video Uploading) 

So IPS would need to implement something similar in their framework... or maybe a 3rd party add-on could implement it specifically for just the Downloads app in your case.

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9 hours ago, Optic14 said:

XenForo Media Gallery implemented this by allowing you to use an external application called FFMPEG on your web server which will automatically transcode incompatible videos. It's similar to how YouTube and Vimeo process their videos on upload to ensure compatibility.

The only problem with that is that usually  FFmpeg is not available on shared hosting. 

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On 12/31/2017 at 2:32 AM, opentype said:

There are also commercial APIs for audio/video conversions like https://cloudconvert.com/api

If there is a way to get this working I would take it. My situation on this issue is becoming desperate. I am getting LOTs of complaints about clips not playing on ios.

I got 7 complaints yesterday with most demanding refunds.

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I am a designer, not a developer, so I can’t help. But it looks fairly straightforward to me. First, check out if a service like that actually fixes your iOS problem when routing your problematic movies through it. If it works, a developer should be able to let uploads for the Downloads app being processed in the background through the API. 

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On 23/12/2017 at 7:19 PM, opentype said:

I doubt the format itself is the problem. That should play fine on iOS or any Apple operating system. It is an Apple format after all. 

I just found a couple of sample .mov clips to test using my iPad 2017, latest OS.

http://users.wfu.edu/yipcw/atg/vid/

There are multiple codecs that use the .mov wrapper.

.mov in QuickTime Sorenson 3 codec (27MB) - This won't play in Safar or Chromei for me.

http://users.wfu.edu/yipcw/atg/vid/katamari-star8-10s.mov

However .mov in QuickTime 7 H.264 codec does play fine in Safari and Chrome browsers, only 3MB compared to earlier version above that is 27MB.

http://users.wfu.edu/yipcw/atg/vid/katamari-star8-10s-h264.mov

So I imagine @superj707 members must be uploading older codec based versions of .mov files.

The conversion method using FFMEG,, CloudConverter, Video.js platforms etc would handle it as mentioned, I'm only just about to try making a Hello World plug-in so cant help, but I'm sure one of our great experienced community coders could do it.

The PHP examples on the CloudConverter site seem simple enough to grasp, you get a key by telling their API the source and output files, it gives you a key, then you use that key in the second part of the script to tell their server to asynchronously download the source file from your server or cloud storage, then it gets on with it. Apparently this doesn't block your app (IPS) like if you were the one sending the source file to them.

I think if you hosted the converter platform on your server it wouldn't be as efficient.

 

 

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@The Old Man The problem is the downloads app :) Even if the format is correct, downloads app will send it as "a file to download" instead of an "inline element" to the clients browser.

It requires some custom code to change the behavior to get

 b3303b72de22012b55bff437c901ede9.gif&key

See also 

To verify it, one could look up the full path to the uploaded video ( Table downloads_files_records ) and try to load it on the ipad/iphone/whatever without using IPS Downloads.

If it works, it's an issue caused by the way how Downloads App handles the file download, if not, it's the format.
( So I don't disagree with you, it could be the issue which you mentioned too, but in my testing it was really only the limit in IPS downloads app)

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3 minutes ago, The Old Man said:

Thanks Fosters! I recall something similar back in the mists of time, when you had to configure Apache to allow certain media mime-types files to download rather than play or vice versa.

Yea, this could be just another issue:D
It's really tricky and there could be a lot of reasons that one gets either a download file or a file shown in the browser. BTW, this is also a great way to prevent other pages from including your own images on their site

One can read more about the whole story here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Disposition

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