Demo: Live Photos & Videos not playing with Safari

[mumbledenoise]

Live Photos are working in the browser on desktop, but on iPhone they do not play. I see the preview thumbnail, but when the video attempts to play the video portion goes transparent. Sometimes the counter and timeline start counting up as if the video is actually playing, but usually it just stays at 00:00.

[lastzero]

@graciousgrey can test it tomorrow, not aware of any issues. This looks strange!

[graciousgrey]

Might be a problem with the CDN? I observe the same on the demo, but on my private instance it's working fine

[lastzero]

Yes, most likely an issue with the CDN. Maybe somebody experienced can take a look?

[ark-]

I get the same on an iPhone 12, iOS 14.8 on demo.photoprism.org.

Has been like this for months for me on the demo website.

Additional info: I get the same behaviour on my own instance which runs :preview build in a docker container which I access via local LAN. So not sure it's CDN related.

[ark-]

More additional info: The same happens on my Macbook in Safari. So perhaps it's a Safari related issue.

[graciousgrey]

Interesting, thanks for letting us know! For my personal instance safari works on mobile and on my mac. For the demo it does not.

[lastzero]

Maybe Safari doesn't like the HTTP headers we use or there is a header missing? Note our API supports streaming, it's not a simple download. Could well be that a detail is wrong. From what I remember, we use a JS lib to enable streaming. Apparently only Safari has native support (which can behave differently):

https://github.com/videojs/http-streaming#compatibility

I can confirm issues with Safari on our demo, works perfectly with my personal instance though. May point to an issue with the HTTPS proxy.

[lastzero]

Other users seem to have issues with Safari & range requests too:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68010780/video-not-playing-in-safari-despite-range-request-support

[lastzero]

It looks like the CDN must be bypassed for videos to avoid streaming issues on Safari. Could be related to this:

• Videos: Exclude streaming from gzip compression #1937