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No Audio in Player

I have been working around this for a while, but this is effecting somewhere between 5 and 10% of our test users. I have had reports of most all browsers and both Mac and Windows.

Basically both audio and video files are not playing the audio using the standard JS embedded player from BOTR. The same link will work for 9 people then not the 10th. We had a temporary work around by telling them to go into the flash settings and disable the option to allow local files to be stored. There are a few issues with this though.

Adobe just completely changed the properties for Flash player. There is a setting but I have not had confirmation yet if this still does the same thing to work around the problem. It also appears to have been rolled into some other options that could have potential problems.

The bigger issue is that this is not a viable work around. Asking the average user to go into their settings and disable this is not workable and we often get the "but it works on Youtube" or "It works on other sites with flash".

Is there any known info as to why the player seems to do this? I found a lot of threads on this in the forum but not really any resolution. Is this a known issue that is being worked on or do I need to look at an alternate player to stream the videos? I love the player, it works great, HTML 5 fallback is great, but I just can't have this many users not able to see the site's core content.

Thanks.

16 Community Answers

Up Down

Remco van Bree

JW Player Support Agent  
-1 rated :

I have never heard of anything like this. Generally if people don’t hear audio this seems to be caused by the fact that they have lowered the volume in the player previously (our player remembers audio preferences in a cookie).

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JW Player

User  
-1 rated :

This is one we had reported months back. Our work around seemed to be changing the "allow storing local files" option in Flash. This is using streaming though, not download, and is happening fairly often.

We do load multiple players in a page at times. (Audio quiz questions) I have tried forcing the volume command in the API on play as well and that seems to have no effect. Since the Flash setting change seems to trigger a "fix" for it I have to think this is more related to the player than a cookie.

Here are some other posts with similar issues...
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forums/jw-player/bug-reports/5998/no-sound-for-some-users

http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forums/jw-player/video-encoding/22350/video-but-no-sound

My original post months back...
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forums/bits-on-the-run/content-delivery/21335/inconsistent-audio-failures

As a note we are streaming these audio files. There does not seam to be one version of flash player or one browser that this happens on. Its across the board.

This is just happening way too often to be a fluke.

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JeroenW

JW Player Support Agent  
-1 rated :

This still sounds very much like muted players through setting of cookies. The “allow storing local files” option in this case does not refer to the video streams, but to the cookie to store the mute and/or volume state.

What you can try to pinpoint the issue is set two Custom Properties in the “Integrations” tab of your players:

  • Set the property “volume” to “90”
  • Set the property “mute” to “false”

This overrides all cookies. If any new complaints occur, the cookies are definitely not involved.

Finally, do you have an example page with video on your site? I wonder if there’s no volume bar on (some of) your video players or if there’s anything else that may cause confusion.

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JW Player

User  
-1 rated :

Very cool! I'll try that. What other properties will the player obey? Can I use this to tell it to not load thumbnails, etc?

We have the players hidden and custom buttons to play them. If this doesn't do it I may need to contact you off list with URLs as this is a pass-worded site so I can't give out public links.

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Remco van Bree

JW Player Support Agent  
-1 rated :

All player options are documented here: http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/jw-player-for-flash-v5/12536/configuration-options it is not possible to disable thumbnail loading

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JW Player

User  
-1 rated :

Thanks. That is what I was looking over, but I see your code overrides "image" so it would be ignored. Any chance that will be swapped in the future so variables we define would override your base ones?

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Remco van Bree

JW Player Support Agent  
-1 rated :

No, that is not really feasible as this is part of the metadata delivered with each video and for most use cases this makes the most sense.

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JW Player

User  
-2 rated :

The same issue with no sound playing for random files and random users was experienced here. Playing with parametrs of player, I found it out it's start parameter issue. If setting it to specific point file plays without audio. If setting to 0 file plays just fine. Any solution?

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Remco van Bree

JW Player Support Agent  
-1 rated :

Can you put up an example page where this issue can be reproduced that also features a null case where it does work when stat is set to 0?

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JW Player

User  
-1 rated :

On the very first video I'm using for testing, when I access it from the local network (http://192.168.1...) both sound and video play. When I access it from the same computer, on the same browser, through an externally accessible URL (http://mywebsite...), video plays without sound. I can have both URLs (local and external) on two different tabs on the same browser, and sound will play in the local one and not on the external one.

I hope that helps...

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Remco van Bree

JW Player Support Agent  
-1 rated :

It sounds like for the external URL you have a volume preference saved in a cookie, not like there is an issue with the player.

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JW Player

User  
-1 rated :

Thanks for the reply. BTW I set "volume" to "90" and "mute" to "false" and now neither one has sound, even after reverting these changes... Sigh...

So for the obvious follow-up question, if it's a cookie how can I solve the problem? Is that a flash cookie or browser cookie? BTW on the Flash Player settings manager I have everything set as deny, forbidden, verboten, e.g. no local storage allowed, which means AFAIK no flash cookies...

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Remco van Bree

JW Player Support Agent  
-1 rated :

I think it’s a browser cookie. Can you show a link where you don’t have sound? Also, if neither has sound, is your sound on?

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JW Player

User  
-1 rated :

Cleaned all browser cookies, tried again, still no sound. This test should not even be needed since my site is composed of the dumbest possible html -- no cookies. Yes, sound is on, I can have another tab with YouTube and sound plays. I give up...

Up Down

JW Player

User  
-1 rated :

But then in Firefox I under "Clear Recent History..." I cleared the Site Preferences and sound is working again. OK, hopefully solved.

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Remco van Bree

JW Player Support Agent  
-1 rated :

Strange. Good to hear this solved this. Unfortunately I don’t understand the real root cause, but this is clearly some form of stale data. As far as I am aware this type of issue is very uncommon though.

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