Botframework-emulator: Bot Framework Emulator v4.12.0 cannot play YouTube video from videoCard, It works fine in Emulator v4.11.0

[saiteja21]

Version

What version of the Emulator are you using.
Bot Framework Emulator v4.12.0

Describe the bug

Cannot play YouTube video from videocard

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to 'Bot Framework Samples and use 06.using-cards sample for test'
2. Update the video link in GetVideoCard() method. I used "https://youtu.be/_QobdWOa02o"
3. Run the project and test it in Emulator v4.11.0 and v4.12.0
4. See error "Your browser cannot play this video"

Expected behavior

It should work as expected as it is working in v4.11.0

[bug]

[carlosscastro]

@tonyanziano could this be related to the electron update?

[tonyanziano]

I believe so, and I think it's related to a similar issue we are seeing in Composer where we cannot play certain audio formats within the new Web Chat control.

I think this has something to do with the internal version of Electron we are using. Certain codecs that ship with the public version of Electron are stripped from the internal version, and to use a build with all the standard codecs we have to pay royalties.

I can verify that this is the case by testing this scenario out locally from the dev build. If I can play the video in the dev build, but not in the production version, then it is due to the missing codecs and there is not much we can do in that case.

[carlosscastro]

Thanks @tonyanziano. Please let us know the results of your investigation.

[tonyanziano]

I did some testing and here are the results:

With the original Vimeo.mp4 link:

With the YouTube link you posted in the production build:

With the YouTube link you posted in the development build:

---

So this confirms my suspicions that this is due to the missing codecs in the custom internal build of Electron that we use.

Unfortunately, we do not really have a way to resolve this via some code fix. We would have to switch to another internal build of Electron that contains the missing codecs, which means that we would have to pay royalties on the codecs.

We are facing the same issue over in Composer, and need to come to a decision about whether or not we want to switch to the other build before we can fix this.

(Composer issue for reference: https://github.com/microsoft/BotFramework-Composer/issues/6128)