Two H.264 mp4 videos: one playing in Chrome, one not

Question

I have two different videos, both (as far as I know) are usually fixed in the same way that I try to play using the HTML5 tag in Chrome. Both videos open and play perfectly in VLC, so I don’t think there are any problems with the damaged file, and both are mp4 with H.264 format using the YUV color space. However, when I try to play one in Chrome ( Version 21.0.1180.89 ), it gives me a button with a gray image, while the other works fine. For reference, my OS is Ubuntu 10.10, although I saw the same problem in newer versions of the OS. This is whether I upload the video to an HTML5 tag or by going directly to the URL where the video is stored. I'm a little bit embarrassed here, does anyone know which direction I should go in order to find out what are the significant differences between the two videos?

Edit:

This works: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/100841270/1_G101_20120914_0139PM_Course_101.mp4

This is not: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/100841270/1_G101_20120914_1156AM_Course_101.mp4

Update:

It seems to have nothing to do with the OS, as I saw the same problem on both Windows and Linux. Chrome 22 beta in Ubuntu didn't work either.

Answer 1

We had this problem and it turned out that encoding files in accordance with the iPhone web browser standards creates files that play perfectly in Chrome. Chrome and the iPhone webview use the same rendering engine, and it looks like they have similar HTML5 video requirements.

Not all H.264 encoded Mp4 files are supported by Chrome, and small differences in the encoding process can create videos that do not work. Even if EXACT same encoding settings were used, H.264 is a variable bit rate encoder, so different videos can exceed the limits of bit rate.

The encoding settings that were successful for us were as follows:

• Use only base level profile H.264 3.0
• Resolution below 640 x 480 and frame rates up to 30 frames per second
• Frame B is not supported in the base profile.
• 900K transfer rate limit.

Here is the reference we used to get these settings. Probably not all of them are required for Chrome, but we stuck to these rules and found that all the videos worked on both platforms. Further research could determine the exact setting that / caused Chrome to not play the video.

Answer 2

I am running Windows XP, but chrome does not like the second.

My best guess is that the worker is only 6.4 MB and the other is about 21.7 MB. Chrome may simply refuse to play back large video directly. Have you tried using YouTube hosting and embedding your player on your site? This may solve the problem. (If you are bothered by random strangers watching videos, why did you post them here? Why does someone even want to watch them? Although you can make the video private on YouTube, if these are just two videos that show the same problem you are facing real videos.)

This can also be exacerbated by another problem that exists with both videos that shows up when I try to use the built-in Windows player. Both videos look distorted when I use my computer video player, stretched as 300% horizontally.

Do you have other videos in the same way? Since these are only test videos for the real thing, if this is the only video with this problem, I would not say that this is really a problem if it does not happen again. The dysfunctional video might just have come across the one-in-a-million chance that it only has the right content so that it doesn't work.

Answer 3

Hi, I have 2 videos at a basic level. One is playing, and the other is not. Please find information on both videos using FFMPEG.

VideoNotPlayableInfo

VideoPlayableInfo