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Video won't play when shared
I've been sharing videos by using the 'copy dropbox link' option with no problem ever. The past 2 times though there's been a line through the play button on the link. When I click it it says 'this file can't be previewed'. This also happens if I right click on file in dropbox and select 'view on dropbox.com'. The file plays fine on my mac and is the same file format as all my previous videos - .mov. It is also less than 3 minutes long. Any ideas what could be the issue?
Hi all,
Thank you all for your patience while we worked on a fix to this problem. We've had our engineers working on this and the good news is the problem has been fixed. Please try the shared links to your videos again and you should find that playback works correctly - if you are still finding video files that are failing to playback on our website, please let us know here and we will investigate further.
Apologies for any inconvenience this caused, and thank you for using Dropbox!
Thanks,
Frank
33 Replies
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- Walter
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hey mig42 ,
I would like to look into this!
Dropbox was experiencing some temporary issues yesterday as stated here, so it might have affected your services. Our engineers have been working on this, it should be fixed now.
Can you please try again and let us know how this goes? If you still get an error, a screenshot would greatly help us see and determine the cause.
Hope this helps!
I am having the same issue. Also not working on mobile devices. See Screenshot.
- Walter
Hey Sink,
Thank you for writing in about this, I appreciate the screenshot.
First of, can you let me know if you are able to open this file locally on any of your devices after downloading the actual file?
As I see you get this error when on Safari, so could you be so kind and let me know if this persists on other browsers(i.e. Chrome or Mozilla Firefox etc.) as well?
If you are not able to open it at all this means that the file could be corrupt or never uploaded to Dropbox successfully - which could explain why you are not able to do this on multiple devices as you mentioned you are having this issue on mobile devices as well.
In this case I would advise to try to share this file anew.
Please let me know what you find!
Ok, I downloaded a file from Safari and it plays after download. I was able to view in Internet explorer but not Chrome or Firefox.
This is not just happening on 1 video, it's pretty much everyone on them.
I did just try in Chrome and Firefox to play by clicking on the open button in the dropdown and it played but it will not play when you click right on the file itself.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/32vhw7dezi2axno/Ask%20a%20vet%20Dr.%20Boyd%20Question%201.m4v?dl=0
- Rich
Super User II
The raw, original file will play (change ?dl=0 to ?raw=1) but the transcoded preview (the version Dropbox displays on the preview page) will not.
Edited to add... It does work in Internet Explorer. It does not work in Firefox, Chrome or Edge, with Edge showing the This file cannot be previewed message. Windows 10 and all browsers at their latest versions.
correct
But of course, Apple wants me to download it. But I don't want to have to do that when all I want to do is preview a video.
