Hi Irene, On Tuesday, 6 February 2018 16:33:46 AEDT you wrote:
> Also since trying to post the appended message to Link, I've remembered this > HTML5 video test site: > https://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html > Hopefully that would help you figure out what type of "HTML5" videos your > installation can/can't play. If they all play fine, then I reckon problem is > very likely "HLS Adaptive Streaming" (which is *not* one of the modes tested > on that site) as referred to in below message. Those videos do indeed play perfectly and I'm sure you've identified the problem, which is HLS streaming. ------- On Wednesday, 7 February 2018 19:03:07 AEDT you wrote: > This page, I found today, tends to me to suggest that pre win8, or win10, > "Windows" may have had zero support: > https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2015/01/29/simplified-adaptive-video-streaming-announcing-support-for-hls-and-dash-in-windows-10/ > > That page also helpfully offers several example "HLS Adaptive Streaming" > pages: > http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ > https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/117827379 > http://www.twitch.tv/riotgames/mobile > > All of those are definitely sending "HLS Adaptive Streaming" and work fine in > my Firefox and Vivaldi, which increasingly leads me to suspect there's > something very strange about SBS setup. And none of those work for me, in fact all return an immediate diagnostic: - "This browser is not supported" (NASA) - "Aw shucks. This video can’t be played with your current setup." (Vimeo) - "6000: Renderer not available" (Twitch). ------- > I'd given up on the video streaming issue for the time being, but your post > to Link reinvigorated it :-) Problem for me is not major, just that it annoys > me that I cannot figure out why SBS videos will not play in my currently > preferred browser (Vivaldi - Chrome based, but much more privacy/user > friendly imo). I'm about to give up on the ABC altogether. The iView techies have always seemed to me to have a history of infatuation with technology; very early on they adopted a take-it-or-leave-it attitude by requiring Google Chrome. They seem uninterested in standards compliance, including HTML5, or even technical descriptions of what they actually do. And although they're not yet using HLS for video, they seem to be using it for radio - see http://radio.abc.net.au/help/streams e.g. http://www.abc.net.au/res/streaming/audio/hls/itinerant_one.m3u8 Now SBS seem to have gone down the same track. Wikipedia has a good article on HLS, which was developed by Apple and submitted to the IETF as a draft RFC (application/vnd.apple.mpegurl). A copy dated August 2017 is available at https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8216 and it contains this statement: QUOTE Status of This Memo This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes. This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other RFC stream. The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this document at its discretion and makes no statement about its value for implementation or deployment. Documents approved for publication by the RFC Editor are not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841. UNQUOTE So the question is this: Why is SBS relying on a technology with absolutely no standards support, and very little support by major manufacturers? HLS support is summarised in the Wikipedia article, and includes the following under "Live Streaming": - Google Chrome (partial support for Android & iOS, unsupported on desktop OSes). - Firefox (partial support from 50.0 for Android, 57.0 for others; current desktop version is 52.6.0). - VLC Media Player (partial support for HLC V3 in VLC 2.x, VLC V3 will have full support). - JW Player SDK (full support). - Vivaldi & Pale Moon browsers not listed. There is a fallback mechanism to Flash, but I'm not clear whether it's in HTML5 or the "partial" support for HLS in various browsers. In any case, Flash is essentially dead as even Adobe have admitted. The HLS.js project at https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/tree/master is said to be "quite reliable nowadays" and to support Firefox Desktop V42+, IE11+ for Windows 8.1+, Vivaldi, and Opera, among others. Later comment by IG: > Hmm, that github page says the relevant script is: > https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/hls.js@latest > and that is *definitely* one of the scripts that SBS downloads, and if it's > blocked, their on-demand videos won't play. That page also says that entities > using "hls.js in production" include "Akamai", which is where SBS downloads > it's videos from - I'm 98% sure they're using "Akamai Adaptive Media Player" So there we are. Best wishes, DavidL. _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
