I've been asked at work to help find a solution to a problem we are having. We have engineers (customers) who are downloading Foxit Reader file which has an embedded .mp4 file. They download the PDF from our internal site (they have access to). However, when they open the mp4 the videos will not play in Unix forcing them to open Chrome. They want us to find a solution for them. Because I am not a techy person and know little about this kind of stuff, I asked if it involved MAC vs PC and promptly laughed out and told it's probably on a workstation or computer farm (laugh away, I have no idea what I'm talking about here). I already had them try VLC player. I sent a contact the items below to see if they've tried them.
Does anyone else have a solution or info to help resolve this? Thank you in advance!
Welcome to the forum. We hope you will find answers here.
You asked us to be "gentle" so I will be.
You/someone has difficulty playing a MP4 file on what????
What operating system are you trying to play it on; Windows, MAC, Unix, Linux???
Does the workstation have a GUI interface? If so, what is it? Windows, MAC, X-Windows, Gnome, etc,etc??
If you can give us a clue then we might have a fighting chance to respond and help you.
Welcome ! If I'm understanding you correctly, you have Foxit Reader installed on both Windows and Linux-based client PCs. On the Windows PCs, when a user attempts to watch an MP4 embedded in a PDF file that they have opened using Foxit Reader, this works (presumably it opens Windows Media Player in a separate window, or somesuch). However, on Linux, the act of attempting to play the MP4 results in it being handed off to Chrome. Is that correct ?
If the above is correct, then can you confirm whether or not the video playback is actually working on the Linux clients when Chrome opens the MP4 ? If it is working, then is there a particular reason that another solution is being sought here ? And if it does not work, what error do you get, or in what way does the playback fail ?
If you could clarify firstly if the above understanding is correct (and explain what is actually going on if it is not), and provide answers to the Linux Chrome playback questions, then we can hopefully take things from there.
I asked the person who came to me about it and nobody seems to know other than their feedback of "we don't want to have to find a source for Chrome just to watch it, it needs to open in Firefox" -- so I did the Google search and shared what I could find but everything came back that either they supposedly tried it or they didn't think it would work. I've already reached out to Foxit to find out from their side if perhaps the Foxit Reader (which they use to view the PDF that contains the video to launch) and we're making a sample document to show them in case it's not Linus/Unix at all and is in fact the reader and capability with Linux/Unix.
I had been hoping to test this myself, but whilst I was able to install Foxit Reader in a test CentOS 7 VM, I wasn't able to find a sample PDF with an embedded MP4 that I could easily grab somewhere for testing purposes.
Basically, when the PDF is being generated (assuming it's being generated using Foxit's own utilities, that is), you can specify the Playback Settings, and provide a list of preferred applications for playback, and preferred behaviours for video playback. So whoever was generating the PDF with the embedded MP4 would (again, in theory, if they are using this software to author the PDF) be able to control what Foxit Reader would do when faced with an embedded video.
Anyway, hope this helps. If not, then if you can explain in what respects this might not be a working solution, then we can take things from there.