Can't serve HTML5 video through PHP on Safari/Mac (5.0)
- by JKS
I'm encountering a strange bug in Safari where, when I serve MP4 video through PHP (to obfuscate the file beneath the document root with a token-based authentication system), Safari for some reason fires the <video>'s onerror event, and the video never loads (I can't get any useful information out of the event object sent to onerror — everything is undefined).
When I access the PHP script directly (i.e., the video is not embedded in a page), the video controls appear momentarily before flashing to a QuickTime question mark.
When I access the MP4 file directly, it works as expected.
What's bizarre is that the embedded video works perfectly in the latest version of Chrome for Mac.
Here are the headers when accessed through PHP:
Connection:Keep-Alive
Content-Disposition:inline; filename="test.mp4"
Content-Length:5558749
Content-Type:video/mp4
Date:Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:24:25 GMT
Keep-Alive:timeout=10, max=29
Server:Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) mod_ssl/2.2.15 0.9.8l DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
X-Powered-By:PHP/5.2.13
And here are the headers when test.mp4 is accessed directly:
Accept-Ranges:bytes
Connection:Keep-Alive
Content-Length:5558749
Content-Type:video/mp4
Date:Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:26:45 GMT
Etag:"1c04757-54d1dd-489944c5a6400"
Keep-Alive:timeout=10, max=30
Last-Modified:Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:25:36 GMT
Server:Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) mod_ssl/2.2.15 0.9.8l DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
The only differing headers are: Accept-Ranges (which I don't think is necessary), Etag, Last-Modified, Content-Disposition, and X-Powered-By.
Not only can Chrome handle the PHP-served video fine, but when I use the same script to load the MP4 through a Flash player, it also works fine. I just can't figure out what Safari is choking on.
EDIT: Also, when I change the content disposition to "attachment", Safari will download the MP4 file just fine.
