Playing MP3s residing on Amazon S3 through Mediafront

Fixed in the 7.x.-2.x release.

I'm sorry to post in a closed issue, but I'm confused. I'm using the 7.x-2.x-dev version from Apr-24-2012, and I'm experiencing this issue. The original post is related to 6.x-1.x code, but the answer says it's fixed in the latest 7.x-2.x build.

Can you clarify which version it was actually fixed in? I just tried another test, and the issue is as the original post - I can play video fine from my Amazon S3 bucket, but not mp3s. Is there something more I need to do?

Sorry, I didn't know it was still a valid issue. I closed the issue because it was a 6.x-1.0-beta4 issue from almost 2 years ago.

The 7.x-2.x version simplifies how external videos are pulled in. I did not test this with Amazon S3, so I'm reopening this.

I think what is happening is that it doesn't know the type of media it is pulling into the player. It assumes video if provided an external link.

Michael, is there a way you can email me the Amazon S3 link to an mp3 and I will see if I can figure out something.

Thanks,

Travis.

Email sent with a link. Thanks.

I just tried this with the latest DEV version and it seems to work with the link you sent me. I cannot reproduce, so I may need some more instruction on your use case.

https://skitch.com/travistidwell/8atk9/amazon-mp3-url-drupal7

Thanks Travis, ok, here's some more info...

I tried it out on a brand-new test site with Drupal 7.14, ctools, and mediafront (the beta1 release) only, to make sure it wasn't conflicting with some other module. Still no go.

But, I've dug a little more, and it seems like it's a Firefox and/or Flash issue with the mp3 format specifically. (I use FF as my primary dev browser) Trying it out quickly in other browsers gave me these results:

latest Chrome: good
IE 9: no good (it forced compatibility mode - not sure why, and wouldn't load the file - don't know if it would work in regular mode)
latest Safari: good
latest Opera: no good

Then I tried an OGG file instead of mp3 in FF, and lo and behold it played fine - using the <video> tag.

So it's somehow gotta be that FF/Opera (and maybe IE9, can't say that for sure), when using the Flash fallback, are breaking it somehow. It seems that neither will play mp3 in a <audio> tag, even though I thought they were supposed to handle it ok.

One other piece - when I put the link directly to the mp3 in my address bar in FF, it plays, but it shows the VLC icon in the middle of the screen, as if VLC is handling the mp3 audio playing in FF. I don't have time to figure that out right now, but maybe that's causing a conflict with Mediafront on my system?

Other info from my system:
- Win 7 SP1, 64-bit
- latest Flash player (11.2)

I hope that's all helpful - at least it's more info than "I can't play it at all"...

That is helpful, I will take a look for release blocker.

I have done everything i can on my end to debug this, and it seems that Flash just does not like this file... Here is the error I am getting when I try to stream it to the browser. "ArgumentError: Error #2068", which is a way for Flash to say Invalid sound. Have you tried different mp3's to see if you have the same problem? I have tried some mp3's on my end and they work as expected, but when I try to pass it your URL, it just doesn't seem to like it. Not sure what else I can do on my end on this one, but please let me know what you find as far as other mp3's are concerned.

thanks,

Travis.

Dug some more, and I'm now wondering if it's my installation of Firefox and/or Flash. I've tried other mp3s, and even with this test one, it plays fine in other browsers, but just not FF12. From some reading I've done, FF just doesn't deal well with html5 mp3. But I don't know why it's not loading in the Flash fallback.

I tried changing the content-type header on the AWS site. I tried changing and resetting the settings in the Applications tab of FF for how to handle mp3 files. I've got 3 different profiles of FF set up, and it works in none of them.

Today I also noticed that it's not playing mp4 video being served from Adobe - an intro to DW6 help video - being loaded with the html5 video tag. So it's obviously not just those specific Amazon files. I'm thinking FF and/or Flash is screwed up on my system

I'm close to giving up on this, and writing FF off for this issue. I'm not skilled enough to dig much deeper on this.

Travis, can you confirm that it's FF 12 you're using to play mp3s? Which plugin is handling playback for you? I've tried the WMP and Quicktime 7.7.1 plugins for FF. Do you have Flash 11.2?

Sorry if this is taking up time, and it is in fact just my system. You've been very helpful, and I appreciate that.

Hey michael,

I was testing with FireFox since I noticed in Chrome, it just plays native. I also noticed that it "tried" to fallback to Flash and play the file, but when debugging, the flash Sound class was giving me an error on that media that was "ArgumentError: Error #2068". I have done some googling on this issue... there were some suggestions regarding code, but my code is doing what all of them suggest so I am not sure if I can fix it with code. There were also some other reports that Flash will give this error if it basically throws its hands in the air and says "I cannot play this file". So... I am kind of at a loss here as well on this. The one thing that I would suggest is to see if you can get it to play with any other media players out there, like mediaelement.js or something. I would just create a standalone HTML page with a different player and try to stream that file from Amazon. If it works, then I will definitely do some more digging on fixing on my end. That is my only suggestion thus far.

Travis.

Ok, I'll give that a shot when I get a few minutes. Thanks!

Ok, digging deeper...

I hand-coded a test on a non-Drupal page with the mediaelement kit, loaded up the same file I sent you with an audio tag and flash fallback, and also with one instance with just the audio tag. In FF, the first instance loads and plays the file fine in the Flash player. The second instance loads the html5 player controls, but won't load the audio file. (Firebug tells me "Specified "type" of "audio/mp3" is not supported. Load of media resource failed." which seems to make sense according to what I've read re: FF and html5 mp3.)

So for comparison, I installed the Mediaelement module on my test site. Since I have to upload a file with that module, I uploaded the same mp3 file I sent you, and it played fine in the Mediaelement Audio player.

Then, I took the link to that file, and plugged it into the text field for Mediafront. And it played fine. But using the original Amazon link, it wouldn't load.

Just to make sure it wasn't the file itself, I did the same thing with an mp3 music file. Same results: Mediaelement plays the uploaded file fine, and Mediafront will play the file fine if it's pointing to the local file system, but not from Amazon.

One more variable to check - try to load it in Mediafront from another site of mine so it's not local but not Amazon. Doesn't load.

So after all this, the bottom line is that Mediafront in FF will play the files in the Flash player if they're in my local drupal file system, but not from another domain. I'm wondering if we're back to some kind of crossdomain problem? Maybe it's some setting in Mediafront's Flash security settings that prevents it from playing a file residing on another domain?

Thanks for doing this.... I will dig within the mediaelement player and figure out why their Flash player works and OSM doesn't... at least this gives me something to look at and investigate.

Thanks,

Travis.

Happy to help. I'm not a coder at all, so I can't help dig into it. But I do what I can...

Thanks to you too for a fantastic module. It's going to be my go-to player module from now on, especially once we get this little wrinkle ironed out. :)

Michael.

Think I finally have committed a fix for this. Please test and let me know if it looks good.

Thanks,

Travis.

The latest -dev release fixed it for me. Thanks for your persistence and skill. Now to get it up and running on my sites.

Thanks again.