solved Video Not Playing In Desktop Browsers (on custom skin)

I'm having a strange issue here. I uploaded a test video, everything seemed to work fine, however when I try to play it now I just get a black screen with the player controls. However, if I connect using IOS my iPhone plays the video just fine.

I've been told videos used to be playing fine and the one thing I did was delete the subdirectories in cache due to an uploading issue. Are there any particular tables/files I should be looking at? I assume if its a settings issue, I wouldn't be able to play anything at all and I'm not seeing any errors in the logs or debug window.

Thanks for any help you might be able to provide!
updated by @rsandnes: 05/06/16 06:25:57AM

Can you point us to where this is happening?
Thanks


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

Hi Paul, thanks very much for your reply. I am unfortunately under an NDA and literally cannot point to the problem which I understand makes this impossible for you unless you have seen this before. That said however, I have enabled error and warning alerts in jrVideo_player_dark.tpl, and that is now showing me in the console:

jPlayer 2.9.2 : id='jquery_jplayer_m56a28c2a5c0a5' : Error!
Attempt to issue media playback commands, while no media url is set.
Use setMedia() to set the media URL.
Context: play

What's interesting is hitting the link directly to: http://www..com/video/stream/video_file/8/key=8vGEEbKicRBf/file.flv

Downloads the file just fine. My first instinct is to blame jPlayer (because we never want to blame ourselves), but comparing it to another Jamroom hosted site the code looks identical.

The site was copied from one server to another, so my prime suspect is really permissions and that deleting the cache directory just showed the problem for the first time.

If the URL is actually playing the video, but you get that error, that's weird. What browser are you using?

Thanks!


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

It is doing it in all browsers, but primarily Safari. However, I just switched skins out of curiosity because there was also some CSS warnings coming up that I found strange. The second I changed skins, videos started playing again so clearly its something that was altered! As soon as I find the exact culprit, I'm going to post the solution here for historical reference to hopefully save somebody else hours of headache.

First thoughts is that you deleted something under:
/data/media

when thinking you were deleting something under
/data/cache

and the media is gone. (quite a hard problem to guess at).

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Second thought is to try manually deleting the cache:
/data/cache

Steps on how to here:

Docs: "Manually Clearing Caches"
http://www.jamroom.net/the-jamroom-network/documentation/problems/114/somethings-wrong-what-do-i-do#manually-clearing-caches

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Third guess is the phone is defaulting to the HTML5 version of the file, so playing, but the browser is defaulting to the flash version which may have been deleted.

All guesses, but hey....

Thanks very much Michael! So ultimately the problem was the fact that jQuery was being loaded at the top of Meta.tpl -- Switching to a different skin made the videos work, switching back of course they would not which certainly helps identify where the problem is. Essentially jquery loaded, a few plug-ins loaded afterwards, then jquery re-loaded causing the plug-ins to go poof!

This likely won't help many in the future seeing as it was completely generated on my end, but perhaps can help somebody not make the same mistake=)

glad to hear you found your solution.