JW Player and Internet Explorer
by paul on August 22, 2011
At work we use the JW Player for all our online video and it’s great. The only problem is, for the longest time, using custom skins on the player causes IE 7 and 8 to lock up in a very bad way. Like, “we can’t use this we’ll have to use something else” bad. I thought it was a bug with the player but a couple versions have passed and I was still having the same problem. The frustrating part was that it worked in IE 9. So what was the problem?
Turns out, Apache was set up to gzip everything – including zip files, which is how you load skins into the player. That’s fine right? Well, no. Apparently…
Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8 report deflate support but do not actually accept RFC 1950 format, making actual use of deflate highly unusual.
Source: Wikipedia
Turns out, IE 6, 7, and 8 all hang when loading a gzipped zip file.
Sure the zipping is redundant, but when all else fails…so does IE.
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