Hello,

We are experiencing an intermittent problem with Quicktime (.mov) objects on an iframe type usage with Floatbox. On some systems running Mac OSX 10.6.8 and Safari 5.1.10 we cannot see any video, but we can hear the audio from the Quicktime mov file being played.

Here is a sample page (no FB license on this page):
http://208.109.110.150/test/

When we take Floatbox out of the equation and just link directly to the page hosting the Quicktime video (no lightbox), the video can be seen every time. But when we launch the page with Floatbox, the video cannot be seen sometimes and we can only hear the audio.

The problem is intermittent, however, there are a couple things we've noticed:

1. The problem seems to happen at regular intervals. For instance, we will be able to see the video four times in a row and the fifth time it cannot be seen. And then the next four times it can, the fifth it cannot. The interval count seems to change each time we clear our cache and reload the page. The next time it might be every 10th time, or every 12th time.

2. Refreshing the main page seems to help and makes the problem happen much less often.

Lastly, and problem the most confusing part of this, is that some computers with the same OS and Safari version do not experience this problem. Running the test on a server with a FB license or without doesn't seem to affect it either way.

Any suggestions are very much appreciated. We cannot launch our site until this is resolved.

Thank you very much,
Mike

Hi Mike,

Sorry, I don't think I have anything for you to get QuickTime to behave. The problem you describe is buggy behaviour in the QT player plugin and is not under Floatbox's control. Floatbox can only add the markup to the current document and then turn over rendering of the video to the plugin. It's up to the plugin to correctly and consistently play it. By the way, the QT plugin in my instance of Firefox plays Sample 1 just fine every time.

QuickTime is not a supported content type in the current Floatbox; partly because most plugins are fairly characterized as buggy and unreliable hacks and partly because a lot of folks don't have them installed. Presenting movie trailers using QuickTime excludes probably more than half your site visitors from being able to view the trailer.

I would recommend converting your movies to mp4 and webm and using Floatbox's supported HTML5 video player (with Flash fallback). This should give you reliable playback for almost 100% of site visitors. You could also post the videos up to YouTube or Vimeo and reliably play them from there, albeit with ads.