• Post Reply Bookmark Topic Watch Topic
  • New Topic
programming forums Java Mobile Certification Databases Caching Books Engineering Micro Controllers OS Languages Paradigms IDEs Build Tools Frameworks Application Servers Open Source This Site Careers Other Pie Elite all forums
this forum made possible by our volunteer staff, including ...
Marshals:
  • Campbell Ritchie
  • Jeanne Boyarsky
  • Ron McLeod
  • Paul Clapham
  • Liutauras Vilda
Sheriffs:
  • paul wheaton
  • Rob Spoor
  • Devaka Cooray
Saloon Keepers:
  • Stephan van Hulst
  • Tim Holloway
  • Carey Brown
  • Frits Walraven
  • Tim Moores
Bartenders:
  • Mikalai Zaikin

Unable to view .mov video within forum post when accessed via iPhone (but works in normal browsers)

 
Greenhorn
Posts: 2
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
Hi everybody,

I'm completely new to this forum (only just registered less than a minute ago), so if I'm going about this the wrong way /posting in the wrong forum, I apologize in advance.

I've done a quick search of this forum, but have not come across any previous posts related to my question/problem, so I thought I'd post this to see if anyone else has tried something similar.

My previous experience is mostly with IBM middleware (e.g. IBM Connections, Lotus QuickR, IBM HTTP server, Websphere App server, DB2 database server, etc), but I've recently had my first try at setting up a JForum 2.1.9 server, deployed on Tomcat 7.0.42 (with MySQL backend) running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4.

Everything works well, except our users have discovered that if they use their iPhone to access the JForum server, if they click on a .mov video attachment within a forum post, it does not display (it just shows a "broken" icon). However the video works fine when users access the forum post from a normal web browser on their computer.

If anyone has had any previous experience with this type of scenario, I would very much appreciate any feedback on your experiences.

Thanks in advance.

James.
 
author & internet detective
Posts: 41860
908
Eclipse IDE VI Editor Java
  • Likes 1
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
James,
Welcome to CodeRanch!

I suspect this problem isn't actually related to JForum. This post says (at least as of last year), the .mov format isn't supported on an iPhone. I think the first test you do is to try to play a .mov file on the iPhone that isn't from JForum. If it doesn't work, you know that you don't have a JForum problem.
 
Rancher
Posts: 43081
77
  • Likes 1
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
After reading the article Jeanne linked to (I thought it unlikely that an iPhone wouldn't support Apple's own QuickTime movie format - so I had to check for myself :-) ), it seems that only some .mov encoding and/or compression formats are not supported on an iPhone. Intuitively that makes sense to me - you wouldn't want formats that tend to be large, or which tend to need a lot of CPU time to decode, on a mobile device. So some .mov files will work, and some won't, with no easy way to tell which is which.

As an aside, the JForum branch that culminated in version 2.1.9 is defunct. If you're just starting out, I suggest looking into this branch, which has a bunch of fixes and enhancements over 2.1.9 (even more so if you grab the unreleased but stable latest source code in SVN), and is still actively being worked on. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a committer on that project.
 
James McNatty
Greenhorn
Posts: 2
  • Likes 1
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
Hi Jeanne and Ulf,

Thanks very much for the feedback. Much like Ulf mentioned, I didn't think to go and check for compatibility of the .mov files for iPhone given that it's Apple's own format, but I know agree that obviously the iPhone can't support every single specific codec, resolution, fps, etc.

I'm going to ask the end users to try create their .mov videos in a format which is supported by iPhones (as per the link you sent), and hopefully that should do the trick. Also, if I get time at some stage, I might look into giving JForum 2.3.4 a go too.

Thanks again.

Regards,
James
 
reply
    Bookmark Topic Watch Topic
  • New Topic