v3.9.3

Release 3.9.3 (2018-11-23)

Overview

The v3.9.3 fixes minor compatibility issues and continue our efforts toward reinforcing our automated tests.

Compatibility issues with IE11

There were two compatibility issues that could arise mainly with Internet Explorer 11:

• some code in our adaptive logic used called Object.values, which is not defined in that browser (as well as in old webkit versions which we use internally)
• the mediaCapabilitiesProber.getCompatibleDRMConfigurations called Array.prototype.find, which is not available in IE11 as well

Thankfully, most of our users seem to use polyfills which allow to completely avoid those issues.

We could use polyfills in the Rx-player but we voluntarly choose not to. This is because as a library, we avoid doing any side-effect that could conflict with another codebase (for example, our polyfill could overwrite yours, which could have more features).

As this is not the first time we used an API not available in IE11, we now added an automated check in our validation process which alerts us when such API call is written in our code.

This should avoid most issues of the same type in the future.

Compatibility issue with Safari

A very specific compatibility issue was found on Safari, where a modification we did on the MediaKeys object could provoke issues when using another DRM-aware media player.

This side-effect was written as part of a legacy code to improve our compatibility with older browsers.
Since then, monkey-patching has been a banned practice in the player, again to make sure our library does not conflict with your codebase.

By the way, the RxPlayer should now be (finally) completely free of such patches 🎉

EME optimization on Edge

We have an EME (DRM)-related optimization in the RxPlayer, which allows the player to re-use created key sessions.
This allows to load an encrypted content much faster when that content was already loaded before.

However, our previous logic did not allow the Edge browser to profit from that optimization, as we had a really conservative way to authorize it (basically, it was forbidden because IE11 could not profit from it).

We now became confident enough to allow this optimization on Edge.

Automated tests reinforcement

After the HSS issue which triggered the v3.9.2 release (about not accepting empty tracks), we became a lot more realist of our ability to completely avoid or at least detect in advance regressions.

Our current validation policy involves running automated tests and manual "shallow" checks. Unfortunately, we do not have the ressources necessary to manually check every edge case (nor do we think that this would be efficient).

That's why we are currently putting a lot of effort towards automated tests. Those are mainly validating the behavior of the library as a whole and its effect on a page as we believe that such tests are especially adapted to a media-player library.

We now automatically check for that HSS regression (as well as other, older ones). We will from now on try to do the same thing for most encountered issues in the future ("most" as many are only reproducible on specific browsers for which it's hard to launch tests from) and for new features.

Changelog

Bug fixes

• compat: fix undefined Object.values function issue happening in some older browsers (mainly encountered in IE11 and old webkit versions)
• compat: remove side-effects relative to DRM on Safari
• tools: fix issue about an undefined Array.prototype.find method in some older browsers when calling mediaCapabilitiesProber.getCompatibleDRMConfigurations (mainly encountered in IE11)

Other improvements

• eme: activate MediaKeys caching on Edge
• compat: add in our validation process a ban of methods and functions unavailable in older browsers
• tests/smooth: reinforce our Smooth Streaming integration tests