MP4 HEVC video not playing with Chrome browser

Question

I'm hosting videos at my Wordpress website, and my users can upload mp4 video files to it. I know that hosting videos is not recommended for performance, but I'm doing this for beta test for couple of months.

Some mp4 files are not working properly, like playing only sounds with black screen. And I found out that those videos are coded with HEVC. They are playing good with Safari and IE(Edge), but not with Chrome, which is mostly used browser of my users.

Is there any way to make my wordpress website to play HEVC videos no matter which browser user is using?

Answer 1

According to Caniuse, H.265 will only work in Safari and IE.

If the videos were uploaded as h.264, you have support across (basically) all browsers, but you'd have to re-encode them to that codec. You could have a server running FFMPEG to re-encode all your videos before uploading to Wordpress. If you'd like to keep h265 for Safari, you could also create a WEBM version of the video - combined they reach all the major modern browsers.

There are a number of services that can re-encode and host (with CDNs) your videos for you.