more jPlayer grief

Well, I upgraded to the latest dev version of jPlayer and now seeking works in the DNA Lounge webcast archives on iOS, so that's nice. But:

  • Firefox can't seek, because jPlayer falls back to Flash because of Firefox's religious objections to MP3, and the Flash back-end doesn't know how to do Byte-Ranges.

  • Chrome just says "Media URL cannot be loaded". But pressing play on the DNA Radio link works, so it's not that MP3 isn't supported. No idea what's going on.

  • Opera seems to not work at all. It can't parse the jPlayer Javascript.

  • I have no idea what IE does, but I assume it does whatever crazy thing Opera does, since that's usually the case.

So in an attempt to break my web site free of how fucked up iTunes has become, I seem to have built a site that works only in Safari and on iOS.

This is not going exactly as planned.

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21 Responses:

  1. DeCarabas says:

    For what it's worth, it appears to work flawlessly in IE10.

  2. Firefox will ship mp3 support in the near future, but I don't have a timeframe for you. We have experimental support on Windows (preffed-off at the moment), and we have support on Android.

  3. Consider not using jPlayer? It didn't earn a "sucks less than the others" star on this page: http://praegnanz.de/html5video/

    • jwz says:

      When I asked about this last time, jPlayer was the only option that people suggested that had live demos that proved that seeking audio via byte-ranges would ever work, at all.

      If you have a concrete suggestion I'll take a look, but a grid full of whack-a-mole doesn't fill me with a burning desire.

      • I haven't tried any of them. "MediaElement.js" is noted as being their favorite on that site. I don't know if it will seek via byte-ranges.

  4. Anthony says:

    The "listen" link works in Opera 12.13 (Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.13) on Windows XP. Trying to seek ahead gives the following error in the player: "Sorry, seeking ahead doesn't work in this browser! HTML5+MP3 support required.", and then restarts the stream.

    • jwz says:

      Awesome. In Opera 12.14 on OSX, I get "Uncaught exception: TypeError: Cannot convert 'b' to object" trying to load jquery.jplayer.min.js.

      • kesselbrut says:

        Opera 12.14 under Linux works just as Anthony described: playback without seek. Regarding that error: have you tried analyzing it in Dragonfly using the unminimized version from the jplayer source .zip?

  5. Preston Cummings says:

    It works in IE9, including seeking.

  6. Nik says:

    Works perfectly in IE9/Windows 7 and IE10/Windows 8 (both desktop and Metro).

    • Brian B says:

      I have to admit I find it more than a little amusing that our host, quite by accident, has optimized his site for Internet Explorer.

  7. 205guy says:

    And now for something completely different (but that still starts with j--oh, and it runs emacs):

    http://bellard.org/jslinux/