Attached video doesn't play on Safari (macOS and iOS)

🐛Bugs
#1

Steps to reproduce

On a Pro account, attach video file (pick a small mp4, which would play fine it were to be dragged & dropped to Safari), click on it, the link opens in a new tab.

Expected result

The video plays on Safari, as it does in Chrome.

Actual result

Instead of playing the video, Safari shows an “unable to play” icon (https://i.imgur.com/uJ2N3ID.png).

Environment

Safari 12.1 on Mojave 10.14.4. This also happens on iOS 12.2.

#2

From what I am seeing, Safari requires that the server supports the Range header (e.g. Range: bytes=0-16383) in requests, so it can stream the video. (Maybe Apple does this to reduce memory usage when playing videos, especially on mobile?)

It seems that if servers don’t support this outright (e.g. Tomcat seem to does it out-of-the-box), they can usually be setup to support this. Do you think it would be possible for Dynalist to support this?

‑Alex

#3

Sorry for all the messages, but since Dynalist seems to be using Cloudflare, this message, and the whole thread around it, might be related.

Also, from this Stack Overflow answer: “HTTP servers hosting media files for iOS must support byte-range requests”.

‑Alex

#4

Sounds like a technical issue around how we store and serve the uploaded static files.

Could you take a look @Shida?

#5

Hmm I don’t think we’ve ever implemented byte range requests, but we can look into it. Interestingly it hasn’t been requested before and I’m not sure how many other people ran into it.

In general though, Dynalist isn’t meant to be a file storage solution, which is why our file size limit is quite small (50mb). It’s primarily provided as a convenience for storing pictures and we’ve observed some use it to organize PDF files.

#6

Hi Shida,

Cool! Hopefully, for me ;), this isn’t something that is too hard to do on your side. I’ll keep an eye on this thread.

Yes, I understand. And I get how just mentioning “videos” might sound scary. But for what I have in mind I’ll be well within the 50 MB /file and 1 GB /month limits you’ve set. And being able to just drag & drop “support files” directly into Dynalist (instead of, say, putting them on Drive, copying the link, and pasting the link in Dynalist), is quite valuable, and also helps justify the $96 /year price for Dynalist.

‑Alex

#7

@Alessandro_Vernet: hi, we released a fix, could you please confirm whether it’s fixed now? Thanks!

#8

I just checked @Erica, and it works great, with Safari both on macOS and iOS. Thank you for fixing this one, very much appreciated!

‑Alex

1 Like
#9

Thanks for confirming! :heart: