MOV videos not playing on item page, only audio

Hi, I’m wondering if anyone else has had this issue and how to fix it. Under the Omeka settings, it says it supports .MOV files, and yet it doesn’t play the video, at least not on the item level. It only shows an audio player.

Thanks!

Just this afternoon, my mp4 videos stopped uploading correctly. Omeka sees them as audio files even though they have no audio component (they are 5-second video only files). Maybe this is a bigger problem that MOV videos?

What does Omeka report as the MIME type for these files? It’s listed on the right sidebar of the media’s admin show page.

Sorry, but I can’t find the media admin show page. Can you tell me where that is? Because I successfully uploaded one video, I have been trying to figure out why one video loaded correctly and not others – even when they are shorter.

When you are on an item, the media are listed in the right sidebard. Click on the media you want then you will be on the media admin show page.

Thank you! Mime Type: audio/mp4 for the file that is only displaying as an audio file. Mime Type:
video/mp4 for the file that is displaying as a video file. Thoughts on how to fix would be great – should I save the file differently? I use CyberLink Power Director software to make the videos.

Got it - I will stay tuned. This forum won’t let me reply to your last post because I’m a new user.

I have the same issue, but not yet find the solution. The issue may be related to the server (for Safari, it should support http request “range”), but to the format of the file too (mp4 has many variants and some combination of resolution/frame/etc. are not managed). Sometime, the issue appears on Windows too. So I’m looking for the good format to convert all videos and audios the same.

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Can any/all of the people here send or link to examples of videos that are getting detected/displayed as audio? And also ones that seem to be “the same” but are correctly showing up as video, if possible?

This is probably just coming down to the mimetype detection code: it’s tricky to get right for .mov/.mp4-type files, as basically the same “kind” of file is used for videos and just plain audio files. There may be some factor about how the videos are made that’s causing this misdetection (which is why I want to look at the actual files), or it could be a server-specific kind of thing (the databases used for mimetype detection can vary from server to server, and sometimes just updating them can resolve issues like this). We don’t have a lot of direct control over how that detection works, but we have options (for one, as a workaround, we could allow admins to just override the detected mimetype and replace it with the “right” one… perhaps as a module to allow that change).

Daniel’s comment about the “Range” header is about a slightly different issue: sometimes files are properly detected as video but browsers have trouble playing them. We’ve seen that to be an issue with Range before, but at least the problem described here by @handa should be unrelated to Range support.

For an example of a file that is uploading as an mp4 video, see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v6j_TZj9TawNhOSc-2I9sEWyN0HYYkmR/view?usp=sharing

For an example of a file that is uploading as an audio file not an mp4 video, see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LfeidlcIN_Z-VwKAmAJycYDF6X452xgj/view?usp=sharing

If you have trouble viewing, try incognito mode.

Thanks!

My local system has the same issue detecting the types of those files, incorrectly detecting the Tower of London file as an audio file.

There is a difference in those files: the “Tower of London V3.mp4” file is reporting as a “MSNV” file, a format apparently associated with the Sony PSP.

Complete name                            : Tower of London V3.mp4
Format                                   : MPEG-4
Format profile                           : Sony PSP
Codec ID                                 : MSNV (MSNV/isom/mp42)
File size                                : 7.14 MiB
Duration                                 : 6 s 798 ms
Overall bit rate mode                    : Variable
Overall bit rate                         : 8 814 kb/s
Encoded date                             : UTC 2020-07-14 15:23:03
Tagged date                              : UTC 2020-07-14 15:23:03

While the “C.M. Sedgwick” video is reporting as a standard MP4 “ISO base media” file:

General
Complete name                            : C.M. Sedgwick Quote Central Park, NYC.mp4
Format                                   : MPEG-4
Format profile                           : Base Media
Codec ID                                 : isom (isom/iso2/avc1/mp41)
File size                                : 1.87 MiB
Duration                                 : 5 s 0 ms
Overall bit rate                         : 3 133 kb/s
Writing application                      : Lavf58.29.100

I don’t know if that’s specifically the issue, or just a symptom of some other difference with the way these two files were created, but it’s a reasonable guess.

When I used ffmpeg to just remux the Tower of London file, to remake the .mp4 wrapper with the audio and video unchanged, it reported the usual “isom” type and the detection system correctly detected it as a “video/mp4” type file. The remuxed file is available here:

Remuxing with ffmpeg or another tool is a very quick and lossless process, so that could be one option open to you. Or perhaps there’s some change you can make to how the video is produced in the first place to avoid this, I’m not sure.

Thank you so much! I did look at my software for clues but didn’t find any reason why they were produced differently. OK, I will use the ffmpeg for the rest of them and see if that works. Thanks again!

For you or anyone else trying this to see if it helps you out, the command for ffmpeg I would suggest is:

ffmpeg -i "input file.mp4" -c copy -movflags +faststart "output file.mp4"

The -c copy part is necessary to make sure this is just a lossless remux and not a lossy re-encode. The -movflags +faststart is not strictly necessary but is generally a good idea for .mp4 videos on the web: it makes sure the output file is stored in a way that’s simpler and faster for browsers to stream.

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Thank you! I just got ffmpeg on my laptop after watching two YouTube videos on how to do that, and I think that you’ve answered my next question.

I tried the fix above, but it doesn’t fix all my files, and anyway, there are many cases where users upload .wav, .mov, or unknown formats that are not adapted for web streaming.

So I built module DerivativeMedia, that creates .mp3, .ogg, .mp4, .webm, or any other formats you want and that adds them automatically as source in the audio/video html element.

Ideally, it should be a core feature, that manages only images currently (derivative files are only image thumbnails). And even images can use the picture html element with all derivative thumbnails.

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