[Plugin: podPress] Not working on Firefox browser

When I click play it gives the message “buffering” and does not change/play

This is often a sign that something is not okay with the URL scheme or the availability of the source.
It may occur if one activates the statistic feature of podPress without proper Permalink settings.

Have you activated this feature recently?

Does the player work in Chrome or Safari or IE9?

Is the option “Use HTML5 tags” (Player Settings page of podPress) activated?

What is the name of your blog? (May I have a look?)

Regards,
Tim

Have you activated this feature recently?

I believe I activated the stats well before the player stopped working. BUT I’ve been learning so much new stuff setting this up I can’t say this for certain…only that I’m 90% sure I turned stats on before this started.

Does the player work in Chrome or Safari or IE9?

Yes, it works in both Chrome and IE9 (I haven’t tried Safari).

Is the option “Use HTML5 tags” (Player Settings page of podPress) activated?

No.

What is the name of your blog? (May I have a look?)

Sorry, I should have posted this: https://storiesfromthepoint.com

Thanks so much for your response. I figured out what the problem was in gathering my response to your questions and I’ll put the culprit here in the event others have this same problem.

I had been playing around with my .htaccess file and had put in some code to discourage hotlinking. Apparently this code stops the player in FF. Specifically:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://yoursite.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://www.yoursite.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|mp3)$ https://www.yoursite.com/stophotlinking.html [R,NC]

Firefox can be a bit buggy with multimedia content. Does it play when you use a different Firefox user profile?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles

It is most likely not a Firefox bug. The player which has been mentioned above is a Flash MP3 player (1PixelOut) which requires the Flash plugin for Firefox. This Flash player has probably some problems with the measures which Nyetah has used to prevent hotlinking.

This thread is not about the HTML5 Audio/Video player of Firefox.

@nyetah: I guess you have resolved the mystery. But I’m not sure what you could do to use your security setting and this Flash player at the same time. podPress includes a further Flash player which looks a little bit different. Maybe it behaves differently too.

@ntm: Yes, taking the code out of the htaccess file resolved the issue but then I can’t use the (no) hotlinking code :-/. I tried switching to the other player in podPress and it wouldn’t play the files either. But this is only happening in Firefox. Both IE and Chrome played the files fine with the hotlinking code in my htaccess file. So it seems to point back to FF in some way. Thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate the discussion and hopefully we’ll come accross an answer eventually. ??

I can play the files at https://storiesfromthepoint.com without issue. They all play for me. Try playing browsing the page while using a different Firefox profile or disable Firefox addons and extensions one by one to determine which one is preventing you from using the player in Firefox.

podPress shows in Firefox browsers a Flash player instead of the browser-own media player. Because the Firefox media player does currently not support mp3 files.
If you would deactivate the option “Use HTML5 tags” on the player settings page of podPress then Chrome and Safari would also show the Flash player and if you would activate the no-hotlinking settings in the .htaccess file you would see the same behaviour. It is most likely the way these Flash players open the media files.
On a second thought it may have something to do with the statistic feature of podPress.
Could you do a further test? Activate the lines in the .htaccess file again and deactivate the statistic feature of podPress. Does this change the situation?

@nyetah: you can find out whether this is a Firefox issue or not by deactivating the option “Use HTML5 tags” and by activating this no-hotlinking rules. If you can observe the problem in Chrome or in Safari, it is definitely no Firefox bug.

@diondeville: Nyetah has deactivated some restrictive rewrite rules in the in the .htaccess file of her/his blog. That is why you can not observe the problem at the moment.

I have been using PodPress on another site and have never had this problem before. I started a new website for podcasting https://www.DisneyParksPodcast and the plugin works on IE, Chrome, Safari, but not Firefox. I have tried all the suggestions here…all to no avail.

Suggestions?

Hi John,

I have looked into the source code of the podcast post and there is one thing which looks at least unfamiliar. podPress creates a <object> HTML element for the Flash player. But on this particular page inside the code podPress creates is a new line of code which is no product of podPress. I guess a different plugin puts

<div class="fluid-width-video-wrapper" style="">[...]</div>

around all <object> elements in a post. I guess this disturbs the player.
The name of the class attribute suggests that the plugin which pust the code there, has something to do with a different video player or is some kind style helper plugin.
Do you which plugin could be responsible for this?
Which other plugin besides podPress are installed?

Tim

I believe this code comes from your theme. You can find this class name in .js files of the theme.

Maybe there is a theme setting which you can alter. It has probably something to do with audio or video player position or size.

I have installed the Responsive theme in one of my test blogs and could observe the same problem.

The additional <div> container element is probably from the fitvids() functions.

I’m not sure how to deactivate this safely.

I went into the .js folder and played with it until I found a solution. Thanks so much, you put me on the right path!!

I have found a way which will deactivate only the FitVids functionality.
If you don’t need this then edit the file /wp-content/themes/responsive/js/responsive-scripts.js.
Line 4 should start with

}(function(a){a.fn.fitVids=fun[...]

Set a comment symbol after the curly bracket:

}//(function(a){a.fn.fitVids=fun[...]

and save the changes.

Yes you could do this but please note that this will “kill” the responsive videos, if you add any of them in the future they will no longer be responsive.

Another thing, from the couple of URLs above I noticed that you guys are not using a Child Theme, as strongly recommended by https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Child_Themes and as well as https://themeid.com/forum/topic/505/child-theme-example/ whatever you changed will be lost in next Theme update.

Thanks for using Responsive Theme,
Emil