Attempting to view .mp4 video file on Safari browser thru img_auth.php - MediaWiki-l

18 Dec 2015

Hello everyone,

Thanks you in advance for reading this post and any assistance! :)

I'm attempting to view/replay a .mp4 video file that has been uploaded into my wiki
using Mediawiki 1.25 thru the img_auth.php process on Safari on a Mac. The video player
"becomes visible" and says "loading" but the content never plays. The
file appears and plays just fine in Chrome, IE, and Firefox. So my question is has anyone
else run into this issue and/or why would this be an issue just for safari? On a related
note, I stuck my video file in one of my web accessible extension directories and the
video file plays just fine on all browsers. So I'm thinking there's something in
img_auth.php, but not sure.

So details to test/recreate:
- Simple/small .mp4 file: (e.g. TestVideo.mp4)
- Mediawiki v1.25
- Mac: v10.10.5
- Safari: v9.0.2

Test steps:
1) In my Wiki I use the Special:Upload page to upload my TestVideo.mp4 to the wiki. The
result is two links like so:
- http://server/MyWiki/index.php/File:TestVideo.mp4 and
- http://server/MyWiki/img_auth.php/d/da/TestVideo.mp4

If you go directly to the second link, the video plays fine in IE, Chrome, and Firefox but
not in Safari.

A follow up test:
1) I manually uploaded my TestVideo.mp4 to a random extension directory (since that was
web accessible outside of img_auth.php) such as:
- http://server/MyWiki/extensions/MyExtension/videos/TestVideo.mp4

And this link plays the video just fine on all browsers.

So does anyone have any thoughts (or solutions on how to fix) why img_auth.php is doing
something that isn't properly playing the .mp4 video on Safari, but works on the other
browsers?

Thank you again for the assistance!
Regards,
Kevin Forbes