Safari 13.0.5 doesn't play certain videos

[bogdanw]

I don't usually use Twitter, but I just noticed that Safari gives the error message "The media could not be played." when trying to play a video. Here's an example

https://imgur.com/a/WRagiKV

https://imgur.com/a/WRagiKV

It works with the user agent set to Firefox - macOS.
Another error message is "Error loading this resource", shown on this page https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/02/linux-distro-review-intels-own-clear-linux-os/ when trying to play this video https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/clear-linux-gimp-2.10-race.mp4
Back in the day, we used to install Perian or VLC's plugin. Is there something similar now?

 

[Ritsuka]

The arstechnica one is encoded in H.264 High 4:4:4 Predictive profile. Intel's hardware h.264 decoder can't decode that, neither QuickTime. They clearly encoded it in the wrong format.

Most browsers on Linux can't use the hardware decoder, so they probably didn't even know.

The twitter one is probably something wrong on Twitter backend.

 

[bogdanw]

Both work in Chrome 80.0.3987.116 without any issues.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1227846383325061121

 

[Ritsuka]

The Twitter one works in Safari on my Mac.

Chrome has got its own H.264 software decoder to use if the hardware one fails, so probably it supports H.264 4:4:4 too. Safari uses AVFoundation, and AVFoundation doesn't support it.

 

[bogdanw]

The Twitter one works in Safari on my Mac.

That's strange, I get Unsupported plug-in when trying to play the embedded media https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1227647420886024193/pl/KDZow0sQvjtznvlh.m3u8

And QuickTime Player returns The document “KDZow0sQvjtznvlh.m3u8” could not be opened. An unknown error occurred (-12151)

 

[rurza]

Did you solved it? I have the same issue