Vimeo videos won’t play in Firefox

13th February 2014
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Vimeo Screen

My embedded Vimeo video won’t play. Why?!

Here’s the steps to reproduce:

  • FF 26 on a Mac
  • Mac running 10.8.5
  • Video on a page shown with jQuery by clicking a button
  • Video made responsive using FitVids.js

I posted to the Vimeo forums but then found this on Stack Overflow:

It seems to occur when your embed is initialy hidden.

Just add ?html5=1 to your embed url. IE8 will still take flash version. or load your video with the Youtube api. @Mr_Green

So the fix is to add this to the iframe source at the end of the url:
src="//player.vimeo.com/video/XXXXXXXX?html5=1"

My only guess is Firefox is giving up rather than try to figure out if the video is HTML5 or not. I’d love to hear any ideas on this.

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Nathaniel Flick

I'm a Front End Web Developer passionate about usability. My primary specialties are HTML5, CSS3, SCSS, LESS, and jQuery and I am very familiar with Foundation and Bootstrap frameworks. I've worked on top of and with WordPress, Shopify, Rails, Python, and ASP.net/Umbraco frameworks.

4 thoughts on “Vimeo videos won’t play in Firefox”

  1. Nathaniel, thanks for the fix, but unfortunately didn’t fix mine. Wish it were that simple in my case. Running FF 27.0.1 on Mac OSx 10.7.5. Will keep looking for solution.

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