Situation
We just ran into a funny issue with playing videos in SharePoint. We’re using tje JavaScript library flowplayer to play video files on our company intranet with the help of Flash, as I mentioned and demoed e.g. here and here. What we wanted to do next is to provide this functionality also on other servers (not just Asia Pacific, but globally). Besides flowplayer, we also looked at JW Player as an alternative, which uses a similar method of playing videos.
Issue
What now happened was that the videos were playing perfectly fine in our Asia Pacific intranet, but nowhere else. Interestingly, there were no JavaScript errors, and the library seemed to do what it should. There just wasn’t any video playing at all, we saw either a white or a black box, nothing else.
Solution
After lots of troubleshooting and testing we finally discovered the issue and the solution. The web application that hosts our Asia Pacific intranet had its Browser File Handling settings set to Permissive, while the other servers and web applications had it set to strict. After changing that, the video worked everywhere.
Note: This change affects not only the video files, but of course all files in your environment (PDF, Office, …). So before changing it, make sure that it doesn’t introduce any unwanted behaviour
Here are the steps to get there:
Open Central Admininistration -> Go to Manage web applications -> Select the corresponding web application and select General Settings from the Ribbon -> select General Settings again -> Change Browser File Handling from Strict to Permissive
