Safari 4 - can't access BBC video/audio content?

[Hogster]

Hi all

Just installed Safari 4 and immediately noticed I can't access any media content on the BBC website (and I'm sure there're others which are affected too). There's just a blank space where the video / audio should appear! This happens in both the iPlayer and in there news pages. Eg:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/ne...00/8096210.stm

There's just a big white space between the title (The week's weird videos - Odd Box) and the description below

Any thoughts on this problem are much appreciated! I've installed the latest version of flash, Adobe AIR and have tried emptying the Cache, all to no avail

Many thanks for your thoughts


David

[roncross@cox.net]

There is nothing wrong with your browser and most definitely something wrong with the site. I tried it on Camino, Firefox, Safari, omniweb, Internet Explore and it's blank on all browsers.

[Hogster]

Hmm how strange! A friend of mine can view the videos fine on a PC .... wonder what the BBC are up to? .....

At least I know it's not a problem on my computer

Cheers


David

[dr_lha]

I see this issue too, on my wife's Tiger laptop. The problem doesn't occur using Camino on the same machine, or using Safari 4 under Leopard. I see you use Tiger too so that might be the issue.

It seems to be affecting javascript on the BBC news website, I don't see any of the picture slideshows or the news ticker on the front page either.

I sent a bug report to Apple.

[freelunch]

I'm using Safari 4 and watching the video that your link brought up. It plays fine. However, Little Snitch said that the site wanted to link to some other site and I had to okay the link. (Sorry I didn't read the dialogue box more carefully.) Maybe your firewall is preventing the connection?

Oh, yeah. I'm in London.

[roncross@cox.net]

Try again, I just went to the site and it works. So whatever it was, it's fix now.

[Hogster]

Yup it all seems to be working fine now! Even the iPlayer is working!

Thanks for the replies all - much appreciated


David

[EatsWithFingers]

According to this story on The Register, the problem was at the BBC's end. According to one of the comments:

Quote: Originally Posted by Tim Bradshaw iPlayer is substantially made of JavaScript of course, and one bit of it is this: http://wwwimg.bbc.co.uk/glow/1.4.2/gloader/glow/glow.js. As of yesterday sometime, that URL was being served as a compressed (gzipped) data. However the headers provided by the web server said it was JavaScript. This meant that the browser attempted to run the compressed data, rather than decompressing it, and fell over as a result. It only affected people who didn't already have it cached of course (or when it got flushed from the browser cache). As of this morning the file is being served uncompressed. Having looked at old (cached) versions and the new version I think that what must have happened is that some change was made to the file which made it much larger. So they decided to serve it compressed (sensible) but failed to change whatever config needs to be changed to tell the server that it was compressed.