mp4 not playing in IE 11 - any solutions?

[straygoat]

I have a project that contains several mp4 videos. They work fine in Chrome and Firefox, but not IE. Unfortunately, the client is tied to using IE due to a nation-wide policy. Does anyone have a solution for getting mp4s to work in IE11? (I could convert the mp4s to a different format, but they also need to be viewable on android phones/tablets and iphones too.

[straygoat]

I think this might fix it - in the code for the video, add:

type="video/x-m4v"

after the src.

Apparently, IE handles mp4 videos differently to the other browsers, so you need to set the type. I'm still having some issues getting this to run locally on a server though, but that could be down to security settings. It definitely works locally on my laptop in IE, Chrome and FireFox.

More info and the video that revealed this information here: http://straygoat-technicalauthor.co.uk/ ... lorer.html

[straygoat]

Hmmm....strange. It looks like in the build process, Flare replaces the x-m4v with mp4. But for some reason, that is now working in IE for me (on my desktop, anyway), whereas it definitely wasn't working this morning. I've asked MadCap for assistance and will update when they provide more info (will update the blog post too).

[NorthEast]

I've had similar issues, but in my case I found it was the server that was causing the issue.

mp4 videos in help on my local drive work fine in IE11, Firefox (33) and Chrome (39).
I've inserted the videos as a HTML5 Movie, so Flare is setting the type as video/mp4 in the output.
(It sounds like you're manually entering the HTML, if you're specifying the type.)

However, when I uploaded the help to one particular server, the videos wouldn't play in Firefox and IE10, but still worked fine in IE11 and Chrome.
When I investigated the response header for the mp4 file from the server (which was IIS), I found it was setting the content type to video/x-flv rather than video/mp4. So there was a mismatch in the content/mime type, which seems to cause a problem in some browsers but not others.

So I tried the help on a different server, which used the correct type of video/mp4 in the response header, and the video plays fine in all browsers.