We are currently using the Bitmovin Player SDK and have recently upgraded from version 8.138.0 to 8.184.0. Before the upgrade, we encountered an issue where live streams could not be played on Safari, while they worked perfectly on other browsers like Chrome and Firefox. After upgrading to version 8.184.0, the issue was resolved.
We would like to understand if there were any specific fixes made for Safari in terms of live stream playback in this version. Additionally, we are curious as to why the source sometimes fails to load when calling play() on Safari, whereas other browsers do not encounter this issue. If there are any relevant release notes or technical documentation regarding this, could you please provide us with more details?
Thanks for asking @nickchen. Something to keep in mind is that, on Safari, our player relies on Safari’s native player by default for handling playback. This can be overwritten tho via the following config, in order to enforce our HTML5 player over the native one: PlaybackConfig | Bitmovin Player API 8.185.0
As such, there are two main things to check on this environment:
As you can see in our player release notes, there’s been many fixes and changes affecting playback in Safari, and specifically about live streams, between 8.138.0 and 8.184.0, so I’d suggest reviewing them.
Finally, regarding the differences observed on the play() method, one explanation might be that Safari’s native player is the default on that browser, whereas Bitmovin’s HTML5 player is the default in all the other browsers. Also, we rely on the browser’s Media Source Extension (MSE), so since each browser is implemented differently, behaviours might differ across them.