happyworm/jPlayer — Issue #72: mp3 loading issue with Flash fallback
Author: farski
Created: 2012-02-21 16:40:24+00:00
State: open

I'm experiencing a loading issue when the source file is mp3 and the jPlayer is falling back to Flash (so, FF, Opera, IE8, etc). The issue is that the duration is progressively loading rather than being set correctly at the outset. So whereas in Chrome, if a file is 60 minutes, and as soon as you hit play it reports as 60 minutes, in FF, it will go 1:12, 2:56, 4:32, etc, etc, until it gets to 60:00. This also affects the seek bar/playhead; when the player thinks the piece is only 1 minute long, after 10 seconds the bar looks 1/6 full, but as more of the file loads the playhead moves back.

We're moving off an old, all-Flash player, which doesn't have this issue with mp3s, so I've ruled out an issue with the files or the server (S3). Essentially this seems like a problem with the Flash shim in jPlayer not correctly doing a head request to get the actual length of the file up front. We're looking into creating alternative encodings for other reasons, which would alleviate the problem in some browsers, but it does seem like there should be a way to fix this in the Flash player.

Is this a known issue, or perhaps there's some limitation causing it?