WSJ.com Embedded Videos Fail to Play

[danmcquade]

Describe the issue

Embedded videos in Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com) articles fail to load/play. Attempting to click the 'play' will load the WSJ's generic 'Daily Download' video every time, regardless of the page/article. Disabling uBlock-Safari results in the correct video loading properly. uBlock on Chrome does not exhibit this issue.

One or more specific URLs where the issue occurs

http://www.wsj.com/articles/linkedins-website-is-no-longer-terrible-1484834439

http://www.wsj.com/articles/court-denies-arrest-warrant-for-samsung-heir-lee-jae-yong-1484772098

http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-tech-make-democracy-great-again-1484763426

http://www.wsj.com/articles/barack-obama-in-news-conference-says-donald-trump-deserves-room-1484773123

http://www.wsj.com/video/first-china-uk-freight-train-arrives-in-london/0D48307D-AF90-45D1-8FBB-A0E691F9ECFE.html

http://www.wsj.com/video/luxury-homes-feature-cozy-winter-gardens/AA087358-9438-4063-93FF-C353DF9AB816.html

Screenshot in which the issue can be seen

Steps for anyone to reproduce the issue

Load any article or page on WSJ.com with an embedded video. Black 'loading' placeholder will appear indefinitely. Clicking the 'play' button in the video placeholder will load and play the wrong ('Daily Download') video.

Your settings

• Safari version: 10.0.2
• uBlock Origin version: 1.10.5.9
• MacOS version: 10.12.2

Your filter lists

Default filter lists

Your custom filters (if any)

N/A

[el1t]

This is caused by easylist's ||imasdk.googleapis.com^$third-party rule, which blocks ima3.js from loading. For some reason, this doesn't break the website in Chrome, but Safari won't load the video. Redirecting ima3.js can solve this issue.

[joshuaseltzer]

I'm also noticing "videos failing to play" with this extension only on Safari. I can use uBlock Origin on Chrome without any issues.

Specific websites include https://www.nhl.com/ and http://www.amc.com. Is there any easy workaround to this or will I just need to disable uBo for these sites?

[el1t]

It looks like amc.com has the same issue—it uses ima3.js, which breaks Safari when it's blocked for some reason. I've been able to kind of fix this by injecting an alternate ima3.js, but it's not very pretty.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem like https://www.nhl.com works on Chrome, which might mean it's a list or upstream issue.

[joshuaseltzer]

@el1t, that's odd about nhl.com - a few months ago (probably about 4-5 months now) when I was using Chrome as my primary browser, it would successfully block ads and play videos on that site. It never has worked for uBo on Safari.

Thanks for looking into this. I'm a developer myself, but have no familiarity with javascript or else I would attempt to fix this myself.