troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

Table of Contents

Problems with media formats

Choosing a video format

I want to have a single source and don't care about live/adaptive streaming:

Most browsers now play MP4 with h264 video. If you want to have a single source, and neither live streaming nor adaptive streaming is a consideration, MP4 with h264 video and acc audio is a good choice.

I need adaptive streaming or live streaming

Use HLS with videojs-contrib-hls or Use Dash with videojs-contrib-dash. HLS is more convenient as mobile browsers have native support.

Make sure you are using formats that Video.js can play:

  • Does your browser/OS support the type of media that you are trying to play?
  • Do you have a Video.js plugin that will add support for a media format to Video.js? For example:
  • Verify that you are using the correct mime-type/content-type for your videos. This is used to determine if Video.js can play a certain type of media.

Make sure that the codec used in the file container is supported:

  • MP4 in browsers typically only supports h264 video and MP3 or AAC audio
  • Some low end phones save video in 3GP format but give it an MP4 extension. These files will not play.

If you are using Flash videos:

  • Make sure that Flash is installed
  • Make sure the Flash tech is included with Video.js (in video.js >= v6.0.0 it won't be by default, see videojs-flash)
  • Flash media include RTMP streams and FLV format media.
  • SWF is not a media format

Problems when hosting media

  • Your server must support byte-range requests as Chrome and Safari rely on them:
    • Most servers support this by default.
    • If you are proxying the media files via a server side script (PHP), this script must implement ranges. PHP does not do this by default.
    • The impact of not doing this ranges from seeking being broken to no playback at all (on iOS).
  • Your server must return the correct mime-type/content-type for the media being sent.
  • Your server must implement CORS (cross-origin resource) headers if:

Problems with fullscreen

  • If your player is in an iframe, the parent iframes must have the following attributes for fullscreen to be allowed:
    • allowfullscreen
    • webkitallowfullscreen
    • mozallowfullscreen

Problems with playback

  • Make sure that the media host supports byte-range requests, this could be breaking playback. See Problems when hosting media for more info.
  • If your media is taking a long time to start playback or the entire mediadownloads before playback:
    • It is likely that metadata for the media has not been included at the start of the media. In MP4 terms this is called the "moov atom". Many encoders are configured to do this by default, others may require you to choose a "fast start" or "optimize for streaming" option.

Video.js Errors

vdata123456 errors

This error is thrown when an element that is associated with a component is removed from the DOM but the event handlers associated with the element are not removed. This is almost always due to event listeners not being disposed when dispose is called on a component.

To fix this issue please make sure that all event listeners are cleaned up on dispose.