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mig42's avatar
mig42
Explorer | Level 3
9 years ago
Solved

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 f...
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  • Frank_S's avatar
    Frank_S
    9 years ago

    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

Sink's avatar
Sink
Helpful | Level 5
9 years ago

Walter's avatar
Walter
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
9 years ago

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!

  • Sink's avatar
    Sink
    Helpful | Level 5
    9 years ago

    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.

      • Rich's avatar
        Rich
        Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
        9 years ago

        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.

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