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htmliisaudiomp3

Why can't some clients play some html5 audio from IIS?

We run an IIS 7 server hosting a site that plays short 10-20 second MP3's. The code we use for our player is:

<audio autoplay="autoplay" controls id="audio_player" preload="auto"  >
<source id="mp3_src" src="path_to_mp3/clip.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
<source id="ogg_src" src="path_to_ogg/clip.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
<!-- BEGIN fallback -->  
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="/flash_mp3_player.swf" width="340" height="50">
<param name="movie" value="/flash_mp3_player.swf" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<param name="flashvars" value="filename=path_to_mp3/clip.mp3;autostart=true" />
<embed href="html5-mp3player.swf" width="340" height="50" name="player" align="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="filename=path_to_mp3/clip.mp3;autostart=true"/>
</object>
<!-- END fallback -->

For most users, this is not an issue. We serve and play about 50 clips every few minutes, and have users on almost every major platform that you'd expect (Win XP-8, OS X 10.4+, iOS 5+, Android 2+, etc.).

Recently, as our work load has increased, we're seeing a large number of people who say the clips aren't playing for them. Most of the time we hear of no specific error, but when we do, it's almost always IE9+ reporting "Error: Unknown file type or invalid file path".

At this point, we're stumped. The IIS box is not struggling physically, and this site is the only one on it. Below are a list of variables about the environment that may help.

  • Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7
  • MIME types are configured properly
  • MP3 clips live on a virtual directory, although some are on the server itself. Both locations can fail to play
  • There are no errors logged by IIS during a fail to play for a client
  • This happens at all times of the day and night
  • This happens seemingly randomly with over 200,000 different files
  • All MP3's are encoded at 128kbps @ 44100
  • The HTML5 and Flash portions are both prone to failure
  • Usually, requests are 206, although it isn't uncommon to see 200 responses
  • There's 1 application pool set up for the site and configured to use only 1 worker process
  • We have never been able to reproduce the error, either on or off of the network the site is served from
  • Often, users can refresh (multiple times) and actually get the clip loaded and played through

Any help or a point in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Solution

  • We've done several things to try and solve this issue. We moved a portion of the media to an aws s3 bucket and refactored some code.

    Essentially, we were adding listeners to the audio element by ID and by tag reference and those were both called from two different locations. After we consolidated the code to stay in the external js file, and set all listeners within a function that gets called from the ajax page, things seemed to start working out.

    We still see some (very few) issues with IE9+, but have an error listener monitoring this. Each time a user reports an error, the error listeners reports a status code of 4 (MEDIA_ERR_SRC_NOT_SUPPORTED), which is odd.

    So, problem is mostly fixed. Now to track down the error code 4 for IE (even though all files will eventually play through it). Perhaps it has something to do with the media player installed on the machine that's in charge of MP3 playback?