There are a lot of potential places where things can break. When it’s just one browser then, from what I’ve seen and read, it is often a matter of support for the format of the video. Early on with the video tag in HTML 5 this was a major issue but has become less of an issue but not all formats for encoding a video are supported in all browsers. I believe mp4 videos using the H.264 format is the most common and generally supported across all browsers but there are a lot of alternatives and variations that may be causing a problem.

As has been discussed in some of the other comments, if you can use YouTube, Vimeo, or some other similar video service they generally handle these details for you.

Yeah, I’ve seen similar results. Unfortunately ServiceNow is not set up well for handling large video. For things like that I’ve most often seen companies use YouTube or some other video hosting solution.

Thanks, those are definitely good steps to consider.

Generally the preferred solution has been YouTube hosting if your organizations information Security team will allow it. If you do place your videos on YouTube, remember to set your privacy setting for the videos and (stating the obvious) don’t show any personally identifiable or business confidential information (anonymizing your data before recording your video can take some time) and also wipe out your URL text on the video.

You will also need to configure some of the settings for the video on YouTube.

Ensure you have Selected ‘Unlisted’ under the Basic Info tab to stop anyone stumbling across your video, and under the Advanced Tab, under Distribution Options ensure ‘Allow Embedding’ is checked so that you can put it in your KB article. It’s also probably best to untick ‘Allow Comments’, the ‘Users can view ratings for this video’ and ‘Allow viewers to contribute translated titles, descriptions, and subtitles/CC’ options.

Using YouTube works seamlessly. Just put the link into your KB article and your are good to go. The video will start immediately once played (depending on your internet link).

YouTube Security info can be found here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/157177

There are a lot of ins and outs of video across devices. iOS is pretty picky in what it will allow for video. I don’t have an immediate solution for you, but in the research I’ve done there are a couple possible fixes that can be made by optimizing the video for iOS and/or web. As I have time I’ll try and make some progress in that approach.

From the performance perspective some the same optimizations for the web could help, but it depends on ServiceNow’s support. Basically, some videos are set up to be able to stream well and some operate under the assumption that you’ll have the whole file available as when it’s stored on your computer. If you want to understand some of the details involved, here is an article that explains some of it pretty well.

As an alternative, most frequently, I’ve seen people host their video on YouTube so they don’t have to worry about those details. Instead of whitelisting the video and source tags, you’d need to whitelist the iframe tag. There are pros and cons to going this way but it’s certainly a lot simpler. The biggest potential downside I’ve heard is around security and the potential for someone to put in an iframe to malicious content. Generally the HTML fields are limited to folks that are part of your organization and for most organizations this hasn’t been a significant concern but for a few it has been. The advantage is that YouTube takes care of all the messy video support issues and it just works.

Here’s the snippet that can be added to the HTMLSanitizerConfig script include to whitelist the iframe tag:

iframe: {
	attribute:["align", "frameborder", "height", "longdesc", "marginheight", "marginwidth", "name", "sandbox", "scrolling", "src", "srcdoc", "width"],
	attributeValuePattern:{}
}