What could cause a WMV to not play to completion in a browser?
- by Ty W
A realtor has had videos created for a community she is selling homes for, the people who made the videos gave them to us in WMV format. I can play these videos without any problem in Windows Media Player, VLC, and Quicktime (via Flip4Mac). I can play the videos from their location at videohomeguide.com in my browser without any trouble. However when I upload the files to our server the video stops at about the 1 minute mark in Safari and FireFox on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I'm not sure if Windows browsers have the same issue because they are loaded using Windows Media Player.
http://carolepaul.com/images/uploads/cottageslsjamestown.wmv <- our server, will fail at 1:09ish.
http://www.videohomeguide.com/media/cottageslsjamestown.wmv <- should play to completion (3:27ish)
The files generate the same MD5 hash on my desktop and on our server. I used WGET to transfer the files, always downloading from videohomeguide.com.
Since the files are identical and are playable using VLC/WMP/Quicktime, and playable in the browsers from videohomeguide.com it seems to me that it is some sort of server config... maybe incorrect headers sent to the browsers? Here are the headers sent and received by FireFox on OS X:
http://carolepaul.com/images/uploads/cottageslsjamestown.wmv
GET /images/uploads/cottageslsjamestown.wmv HTTP/1.1
Host: carolepaul.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2) Gecko/20100316 Firefox/3.6.2
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:43:20 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) PHP/5.2.6 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_psoft_traffic/0.2 mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.8b
Last-Modified: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:08:46 GMT
Etag: "1e7919c-198eadc-4b16ad2e"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 26798812
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=200
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: video/x-ms-wmv
