Client closes connection when streaming m4v from apache to chrome with jplayer

Question

I've set up a bit of a test site.. I'm trying to implement an HTML5 video to play on a site I'm developing and I want to use jplayer so that it falls back to an swf file if html5 video is not supported.

http://dev.johnhunt.com.au/ is what I have so far. It works fine if I provide http://www.jplayer.org/video/m4v/Big_Buck_Bunny_Trailer_480x270_h264aac.m4v for the video, however if I host it on my own server it simply never starts playing.

The mime type is definitely correct, video/m4v. Charles proxy says:

Client closed connection before receiving entire response

Infact, here's the entire request:

GET /Big_Buck_Bunny_Trailer_480x270_h264aac.m4v HTTP/1.1
Host    dev.johnhunt.com.au
Cache-Control   no-cache
Accept-Encoding identity;q=1, *;q=0
Pragma  no-cache
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.79 Safari/537.4
Accept  */*
Referer http://dev.johnhunt.com.au/
Accept-Language en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Cookie  __utma=120066461.1007786402.1349773481.1349773481.1349786970.2; __utmb=120066461.1.10.1349786970; __utmc=120066461; __utmz=120066461.1349773481.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)
Range   bytes=0-

And response:

Some binary data (maybe 3 or 4kbytes long)

Which looks ok. I assume the 'client' is my chrome browser.. why is it giving up? How can I fix this? It's driving me mad as I can't find anything on google :(

When I use the m4v file on jplayer.org this is the request:

GET /video/m4v/Big_Buck_Bunny_Trailer_480x270_h264aac.m4v HTTP/1.1
Host    www.jplayer.org
Cache-Control   no-cache
Accept-Encoding identity;q=1, *;q=0
Pragma  no-cache
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.79 Safari/537.4
Accept  */*
Referer http://dev.johnhunt.com.au/
Accept-Language en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Cookie  __utma=24821473.325705124.1349773077.1349773077.1349773077.1; __utmc=24821473; __utmz=24821473.1349773077.1.1.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=(not%20provided)
Range   bytes=0-

Response:

Lots of binary data (very long.. working)

Cheers, John.

Answer 1

I've found that when the Chrome browser sends a "Range: bytes=0-" request, you should NOT respond with a "206 Partial Content" response. To get Chrome to handle the data properly, you need to send back a "200 OK" header.

I don't know if this is correct according to the specs but it gets Chrome to work and does not appear to break other browsers.

Answer 2

Having just run into this with Chrome, it seems that you need to ensure that the Content-Range header is set by your server in the response.

From http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html:

Examples of byte-content-range-spec values, assuming that the entity contains a total of 1234 bytes:

      . The first 500 bytes:
       bytes 0-499/1234
      . The second 500 bytes:
       bytes 500-999/1234
      . All except for the first 500 bytes:
       bytes 500-1233/1234
      . The last 500 bytes:
       bytes 734-1233/1234