Media playlist error in Safari

[sarahjeansweeney]

The media playlist exhibit tool appears not to be working in Safari.

If you visit the http://whatsnewpodcast.org site in Safari, you'll notice the most recent episode has an error ("Error loading playlist: No playable sources found") and the play icon is replaced with an error icon:

The same video works in Firefox and Chrome. There are other videos on the page that do work in Safari – these were embedded using the Single Item exhibit tool, not the playlist tool, which leads me to believe this is an issue with the playlist exhibit tool and/or Safari, not Wowza or JW Player:

It's possible these two issues aren't related, but I think it's worth meantioning that there is another issue with Safari not displaying captions: NEU-Libraries/cerberus#1161

[amclark42]

Archives found that the Lower Roxbury Black History Project has this problem today. Confounding the issue, the video on this page works, but the video on the landing page does not.

The problem only occurs in Safari, and appears to be due to (A) special-casing the way JW Player works in Safari, and (B) a source URL set to an empty string.

I did some poking in the Safari developer tools and found this:

jwplayer("drs-item-video-neu-m039sg68p").on("ready", function() {
         if (is_safari){
           //defaulting to m3u8 stream for safari since it functions better
           jwplayer("drs-item-video-neu-m039sg68p").load([{image: "https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m039sg70q?datastream_id=thumbnail_5", 
             sources:[{ file: ""}]}]);
// [ indentation added so the problem is visible without scrolling ]

The listed source of this video is not a URL but an empty string.

Here's the code that introduces the Safari-specific conditional.

I'm guessing the Safari-specific conditional arose because of some issue like the one reported in this issue. If so, the workaround reported in that issue might be of help.

Hope this helps!