MP4 web-videos not playing anymore

HaLo2FrEeEk

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I don't know what happened, but suddenly my phone isn't playing mobile-formatted MP4 videos from the internet anymore. I noticed it first with a video on my own site, that I encoded using ffmpeg. I want to make sure it's not just me, so could someone try to load either (or both) of these 2 videos on their phone please:

http://infectionist.com/tutorials/after_effects/fire_mobile.mp4
http://infectionist.com/tutorials/sony_vegas/stereoscopic/stereoscopic_mobile.mp4

For me, the first one plays maybe a second and a half, the second one plays maybe 3 seconds, but then they both come up with a popup saying "Sorry, this video cannot be played."

I have other mobile-encoded videos elsewhere on my site and they all work fine. I tried re-encoding the videos that weren't working and no matter what I try, it just won't work! The weird thing is, they used to work perfectly. I didn't change anything, so there's no reason it should have stopped working.

I use ffmpeg to encode my videos from their original format to 640x360, 256kb/s video, 128kb/s audio, then I use qt-faststart (included with ffmpeg) to relocate the moov atom in the MP4 file to the beginning of the file, so that the video can be streamed over HTTP. This has always worked for me before, and the other videos I've done this to still work fine, so I can't figure out why these two videos specifically won't work.

Edit: I should note that I tried downloading the video to my local server and accessing it through my wireless network, and I had the exact same results, so that rules out it being a server issue. I can play the video perfectly fine on my computer, but if I copy it to my phone and try to play it from there, it also doesn't work, which indicates that it's an issue with the way I've encoded the video perhaps. Like I said though, these used to work fine, and the other ones that also used to work still work fine, it's seriously just these 2 videos.
 
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MarkDF

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I wish I had a solution. I have the same problem. Videos don't play after the froyo upgrade that played just fine before the upgrade.

 

oilstain

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I wish I had a solution. I have the same problem. Videos don't play after the froyo upgrade that played just fine before the upgrade.


Ditto, pretty bummed out about the video problem.
 

Im_Gumby

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I noticed this too... and while it won't help with the internet videos, RockPlayer has the missing codec that will allow MP4 files to be played. Free too.
 

oilstain

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So I tried uninstalling flash, and lo and behold, it seems to have done the trick.

So I guess it's either Flash OR Videos.

I'll reinstall sometime when I have time to play around with it and see if I can get both working simultaneously.

Thats a big ol DERP there.
 

OSX2000

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Disabling Stagefright will fix all audio/video issues. I'd link ya, but I'm typin this on the Droid. Do a search, there's tons of threads here on it.
 

oilstain

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Disabling Stagefright will fix all audio/video issues. I'd link ya, but I'm typin this on the Droid. Do a search, there's tons of threads here on it.


Yes there certainly are tons of threads. Unfortunately it looks like it would take a few days to get through them. From what I've scanned quickly, it has something to do with setting some configuration file to false, which without being rooted, I'm going to guess I won't be able to do.

If you have a chance and know a guide that would work for a stock phone, please post it here, I'm sure others are interested too.

In the meantime, I'll keep looking around a bit.
 

OSX2000

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Sorry, it unfortunately is a root-only tweak. But what better reason to make the plunge into rooted land than by knowing that all your videos are there waiting for you? :)

In the build.prop file, there's a line, "media.stagefright.enable-player=true". Change true to false, and everything will play.
 
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