815808 - Firefox does not play direct-coded inline video from iPython Notebook.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 799318

(Core :: Audio/Video, defect)

Description

[Kannan Vijayan [:djvj]]

iPython notebook is an interactive online environment for exploratory programming.

To replicate the issue, a local iPython notebook server needs to be installed and the notebook at the following URL loaded with it:

https://github.com/ipython/ipython/blob/master/docs/examples/notebooks/00_notebook_tour.ipynb

In the "video" section, the second example does not work with Firefox, but does with Chrome.

  from IPython.display import HTML
  video = open("animation.m4v", "rb").read()
  video_encoded = video.encode("base64")
  video_tag = '<video controls alt="test" src="data:video/x-m4v;base64,{0}">'.format(video_encoded)
  HTML(data=video_tag)

Basically, the server serves up generated video as in-line content base64-encoded directly in the "src" attribute of the video tag, and Firefox does not know how to deal with it:

  <video controls alt="test" src="data:video/x-m4v;base64,BASE64_ENCODED_VIDEO_CONTENT_HERE">

Problem reproduces on release Firefox and later.

Comment 1

[Ralph Giles (:rillian)]

Firefox doesn't support mp4 video. You need to offer a webm or theora encoding as well if you want universal playback on html5 browsers.