MP4 HEVC video not playing with Chrome browser

Question

I'm hosting videos at my Wordpress website, and my users can upload mp4 video files to it. I know that hosting videos is not recommended for performance, but I'm doing this for beta test for couple of months.

Some mp4 files are not working properly, like playing only sounds with black screen. And I found out that those videos are coded with HEVC. They are playing good with Safari and IE(Edge), but not with Chrome, which is mostly used browser of my users.

Is there any way to make my wordpress website to play HEVC videos no matter which browser user is using?

Masturbate

Transcode to h.264. No way to play HEVC on Chrome so far :( – Ambie

Answer 1

According to Caniuse, H.265 will only work in Safari and IE.

If the videos were uploaded as h.264, you have support across (basically) all browsers, but you'd have to re-encode them to that codec. You could have a server running FFMPEG to re-encode all your videos before uploading to Wordpress. If you'd like to keep h265 for Safari, you could also create a WEBM version of the video - combined they reach all the major modern browsers.

There are a number of services that can re-encode and host (with CDNs) your videos for you.

Cacie

:) I would like to see how you put h265 encoded video into WebM container. But +1 for transcoding :) – Ambie

@DimitriPodborski He's saying that you could also create a WEBM version, not put h265 in webm. – Earthenware

Hevc works now in Chrome. – Borecole

You need to add the tag -tag:v hvc1 if using ffmpeg, you can test this by checking this video file davidclews.com/article/161.html without the tag it will not work in ios. Support seems to be improving. – Afterpiece

> Hevc works now in Chrome. Not so reliably. I just tested this with an H.264 to H.265 MP4 conversion made with Wondershare Filmora, and it plays fine in everything but Chrome. Chrome attempts to display it, but it's audio-only in that browser. So, there's still some kind of issue. – Rotgut