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Videos uploaded directly to a forum topic do not show thumbnails on mobile.


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I'm having an issue where if I upload short video files directly into a new topic, when I view the topic on a mobile platform (I've tested Safari and Chrome) the video thumbnail does not appear.  On my desktop browser it does.  Is there a way to fix this?

The topic in question:

https://themeparkreview.com/forum/topic/47661-report-from-warner-bros-world-in-abu-dhabi/

 

Thank you in advance for your help. 

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For example on the desktop it looks like this:

Could contain: Indoors, Interior Design, Shop, Shopping Mall, Urban, Person, City, Wood Panels

 

On mobile it looks like this:

Could contain: Book, Publication, Advertisement, Poster

I've now tested on several phones.  iPhone and Android.  Different browsers, etc.  Everyone gets the same results.

 

Can anything to be done to generate those thumbnails on mobile like they do in the same browsers on the desktop?

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Nathan Explosion was awarded the badge 'Helpful' and 5 points.

5 hours ago, robbalvey said:

I've now tested on several phones.  iPhone and Android.  Different browsers, etc.  Everyone gets the same results.

Tested on Android using Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Edge - the 'thumbnail' is displayed in all.

The availability of that image for the video is up to the browser - it's obtained via preloading of the metadata of the video, which gives it the first frame of the video as long as the browser isn't stopping the default preload functionality for the HTML5 <video> tag.

Invision's implementation doesn't include the preload attribute on the <video> tag, so it is up to the browser to decide what it wants to do as it isn't being told specifically.

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7 hours ago, Nathan Explosion said:

Tested on Android using Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Edge - the 'thumbnail' is displayed in all.

Wow, so the video thumbnails are all working?  I've now had about 25 people test it with all sorts of different phones and browsers and not a single one of them could get the thumbnails to work.  How are you able to get it working?

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7 hours ago, Nathan Explosion said:

Invision's implementation doesn't include the preload attribute on the <video> tag, so it is up to the browser to decide what it wants to do as it isn't being told specifically.

Is this something that could be added as a mod?

2 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

I access the page - nothing special.

And seeing as I am playing around with an iPad right now...looks fine in Safari too.

Right, but you have to understand where I'm coming from.  You are now the ONLY person out of now 26 who have looked at the page and said the thumbnails work.  I'm looking for a solution on how I can get closer to 100% of the people looking at the page for the thumbnails to work. 


Is something like that even possible if I were to have someone mod the forum?

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Personally, I think your problem here is the number of videos all on one page...if I scroll REALLY QUICKLY down the page, and then go back up then I can see that some of the preview images have shown and some haven't.

But if I scroll slowly then they all load as I scroll.

I believe that the default 'preload' value is 'metadata' (so if it is missing then the browser should adhere to that) and that is enough to get the first frame to display it as the preview image. The other options are 'none' (which means no image) and 'auto' (which means the full video is auto-downloaded, ready to be played - you don't want to have that in effect on a page that has so many videos either)

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2 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

Personally, I think your problem here is the number of videos all on one page...if I scroll REALLY QUICKLY down the page, and then go back up then I can see that some of the preview images have shown and some haven't.

This is helpful. I'll do some more research with fewer videos.

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So I've done 

12 hours ago, Nathan Explosion said:

Personally, I think your problem here is the number of videos all on one page...if I scroll REALLY QUICKLY down the page, and then go back up then I can see that some of the preview images have shown and some haven't.

But if I scroll slowly then they all load as I scroll.

I believe that the default 'preload' value is 'metadata' (so if it is missing then the browser should adhere to that) and that is enough to get the first frame to display it as the preview image. The other options are 'none' (which means no image) and 'auto' (which means the full video is auto-downloaded, ready to be played - you don't want to have that in effect on a page that has so many videos either)

So I've done another test with only one video. I sent the link again to about 20 different people, all with a different variety of phones and browsers.  The video thumbnail does not show up for anyone.
https://themeparkreview.com/forum/topic/47662-test/


Clearly this is a problem.

What can be done to fix this to ensure video thumbnails show up?  Is there a way to force it somehow?

 

Edited by robbalvey
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10 hours ago, opentype said:

I tested 3 different browsers. Shows fine everywhere. 

I hear you guys loud and clear, so I went to our social media pages, aka our actual followers, to get a better idea, and here are the results of the first 100 people....

Could contain: Text, Brick

Could contain: Text

So while yes it is great that the thumbnails showed up for 1/3 of the people that looked at it, it is still, at least in my option, a problem that the thumbnails don't work for 2/3 of the users.

Once again, I'll ask the question... is there any way to at all to fix this to get that number closer to 100%?  Is there someone I can pay to write a mod that will force those thumbnails to show for those browsers that are not showing the thumbnails?

This is clearly an issue and I'm just looking for a solution, one that I am willing to pay for which could also in turn help others, I'm not looking for an argument. 

 

Thank you.

Edited by robbalvey
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10 minutes ago, robbalvey said:

is there any way to at all to fix this to get that number closer to 100%?

I doubt it. It’s just a native video being offered to the browser using the “video” tag. To have a thumbnail image, it either needs …

  • a thumbnail image being set in the video tag, but that is not supported for attachments, as the images are not being processed on the server. They are just uploaded. 
  • a thumbnail image being generated by the browser by (pre-)loading the actual video, but that’s not something the browser might want to do given the bandwidth requirements with potentially dozens of videos per page. 

For proper video handling you would need to have a cloud package and use the gallery app. That will handle server video-processing now. Videos just being uploaded as attachments can be problematic. And preview images aren’t even the biggest problem as the entire video can also easily fail when the format/codec isn’t supported in the browser. 

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Thanks.  That's very good information.  Really I'm looking for a solution to take our Instagram story highlights and archive them on our site somewhere, either as a forum post or as some sort of blog post, but sadly, native videos do seem to be a huge issue and our updates usually include a number of quick, short videos, and having a bunch of YouTube embeds doesn't make a lot of sense either.

 

Perhaps the cloud package and the gallery could be a solution for what I'm looking to do? 🤔

Edited by robbalvey
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What I suspect is happening here, is because you are having people testing, I suspect they are flicking to the page, not seeing it, and closing the browser. Essentially just not giving it chance to load. As its native html that is being used there, its difficult to see what else it could really be. Possibly server response time, or even lazy loading if they are having to scroll to get the image and its not yet loaded up. As with others here, I am unable to see any issues to advise further.

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