HTML5 Audio/Video Not working at all on new Windows 7 install

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Level 1

8 points

HTML5 Audio/Video Not working at all on new Windows 7 install

I'm the developer of jPlayer, a plugin for jQuery and my recent testing a new laptop on Windows 7 Ultimate, Safari 5.0.1 found that the audio and video HTML5 elements do not work at all.
http://www.happyworm.com/jquery/jplayer/
http://www.happyworm.com/jquery/jplayer/HTML5.Audio.Support/

My plugin checks for the mediaElement.canPlayType() method and if it exists it then checks the suitable MIME types for compatibility. But that is just the fine details. Basically, the Safari 5.0.1 browser installed on Windows 7, without any of the audio or video support.

Testing on other sites around the web also showed that this install did not include those parts of the HTML5 spec. No idea why. I installed it off the apple/safari site and it is fully updated. Chrome 5, Firefox 3.6, Opera 10.6 all worked fine.
Example of other sites used to check:
http://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/video/basics/

By comparison, my old Windows XP machine works fine with Safari 5.0.1 and has had a version of safari installed on the machine since Safari 3.

Side note, the Mac versions of all the browsers work fine. Also the iPad emulator shows everything works.

Any ideas what went wrong with my install on Windows 7?

Best regards,
Mark P

Vaio F12S1E/B, Windows 7

Posted on Aug 15, 2010 11:41 AM

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Answer 1

maboa

Level 1

5 points

Aug 15, 2010 12:08 PM in response to thepag

I am looking at this issue too. I installed Safari 5.0.1 on Windows XP on two different machines. In these cases I found that the .canPlayType() always returns undefined on an audio element. So http://www.happyworm.com/jquery/jplayer/HTML5.Audio.Support/ showed that no support for HTML5 audio was found. ( http://twitpic.com/2f16nh )

Both installations were clean installs and it was also the first time Safari had been installed on both XP installations.

I don't see these issues on OSX 10.6.4 and others have reported that it worked under Windows 7. My guess then is that is something to do with new installs and not OS.

Mark B

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Answer 2

maboa

Level 1

5 points

Aug 16, 2010 1:34 AM in response to maboa

After further investigation it seems that Quicktime is the issue. It appears that Safari has a requirement for Quicktime to be installed in order to support HTML5 media.

Can anyone conform this?

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Answer 3

thepag Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 16, 2010 4:55 PM in response to maboa

Yep, Safari 5 is not an HTML5 browser.

I downloaded QuickTime:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

Then restarted the PC, since Apple cannot seem to write code for Windows that does not require a restart... And finally Audio and Video worked natively in Safari 5. (With QuickTime installed)

Maybe Apple should remove the browser only option from their download options, since QuickTime is such an important part of the Safari browser.

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Answer 4

Aug 17, 2010 1:04 PM in response to thepag

Well well, I have removed Safari from the list of html5 supporting browsers in my PHP code. Now it gets from my www server what it deserves namely flash based fallback content. Since I am not going to rely on OS detection to sort out Safari 5 installs supporting html5 from those not supporting it the situation will remain as it is for some time (Safari is just 0,6% of my traffic, with 50% ff, 30% IE, 10% Opera and 8% chrome).

Anyway I can confirm that html5 in Safari 5 on Windows fresh install is broken - canvas are ok but media elements are not working.

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