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

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 ā€œunable to playā€ icon (https://i.imgur.com/uJ2N3ID.png).

Environment

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

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 donā€™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?

ā€‘Alex

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: ā€œHTTP servers hosting media files for iOS must support byte-range requestsā€.

ā€‘Alex

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

Could you take a look @Shida?

Hmm I donā€™t think weā€™ve ever implemented byte range requests, but we can look into it. Interestingly it hasnā€™t been requested before and Iā€™m not sure how many other people ran into it.

In general though, Dynalist isnā€™t meant to be a file storage solution, which is why our file size limit is quite small (50mb). Itā€™s primarily provided as a convenience for storing pictures and weā€™ve observed some use it to organize PDF files.

Hi Shida,

Cool! Hopefully, for me ;), this isnā€™t something that is too hard to do on your side. Iā€™ll keep an eye on this thread.

Yes, I understand. And I get how just mentioning ā€œvideosā€ might sound scary. But for what I have in mind Iā€™ll be well within the 50 MB /file and 1 GB /month limits youā€™ve set. And being able to just drag & drop ā€œsupport filesā€ 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.

ā€‘Alex

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

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

ā€‘Alex

1 Like

Thanks for confirming! :heart: