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Amazon S3 Video Playback Errors and how to solve them

Making sure your Amazon S3 videos work properly with all browsers when using the built in video player element in OptimizePress may require additional steps if your videos are not encoded properly.

The most common reason the video will not play on all browsers is due to it not being encoded properly.

There are a few things that would need to be done in order to guarantee proper video playback in all browsers.

Step 1:

You would want to make sure your videos are encoded properly. Just having it in MP4 format is not good enough for all browsers. Usually with sites like YouTube and Vimeo (as well as other video hosting sites), you won’t have to worry about this because they actually process the video and make sure its encoded properly.  Amazon S3 does not automatically encode videos, so you’ll need to be sure this is done prior to uploading.

The best way to do this would be to use a program called HandBrake. We do have a tutorial on this here

Step 2:

After uploading the video to Amazon S3, there are two things you need to check.

First, make sure the video is set to public. Then, if you are logged in to the AWS Console, if you click on the file name you can see the meta info. Make sure the meta is set to video/mp4 (its actually a mime type but its listed under the meta info). That will make sure the web browser knows what to do with the file.

To do this, right click on the file and choose “make public” in order for the video to be viewable on your page.

Also, to make sure the video meta is set correctly, right click on the file again and go to “properties” and then on the right click “Metadata” and under content-type, make sure its set to video/mp4

Please note that you may have to type “video/mp4” into the Value field if this is not an option.

Step 3:

When using the video player element in OptimizePress, make sure to check the “auto buffering” check box so the video will load properly in IE11.

Following all these steps should ensure that your Amazon S3 MP4 videos will play properly on all browsers.

Important Note:

We have found that using a non existent placeholder image will break video playback. Please ensure that your image file is still loading, otherwise you may have issues in some browsers where the video will not load properly. Here is what your “Video Player” element edit screen may show if the image is broken:

You will need to either remove the image, or remove and replace the image in order for this issue to be resolved.

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