MP3 and AAC codec detection uses wrong mimetypes

[NielsLeenheer]

I was looking at http://html5test.com/ this afternoon and was a little confused when it reported that Safari on Mac OS X does not support MP3 or AAC codecs within those tags. Looking at the source it seems that this support is detect like so:

                var r = !!this.element.canPlayType && this.canPlayType('audio/mpeg3;');

And:

                var r = !!this.element.canPlayType && this.canPlayType('audio/x-m4a;');

I'm curious where you got these MIME types from. The Wikipedia pages about MP3 and AAC do not list either of those MIME types as representing those formats. If I make the following change to html5test.com:

--- html5test.com.orig.html 2010-04-11 14:13:04.000000000 -0700
+++ html5test.com.html  2010-04-11 14:12:52.000000000 -0700
@@ -472,7 +472,7 @@
            },

            t2: function() {
-                   var r = !!this.element.canPlayType && this.canPlayType('audio/mpeg3;');
+                   var r = !!this.element.canPlayType && this.canPlayType('audio/mpeg;');
                this.section.setItem('MP3 codec support', r)
                return r ? 2 : 0;
            },
@@ -484,7 +484,7 @@
            },

            t4: function() {
-                   var r = !!this.element.canPlayType && this.canPlayType('audio/x-m4a;');
+                   var r = !!this.element.canPlayType && this.canPlayType('audio/aac;');
                this.section.setItem('AAC codec support', r)
                return r ? 2 : 0;
            },

… then Safari is correctly detected as supporting MP3 and AAC in the

Is there some reason that you expect the MIME types that you're using to work?

Thanks,

• Mark Rowe

[NielsLeenheer]

It seems this is more complicated than applying this patch. At least Chrome does not support the audio/aac mime type, but it does recognize audio/x-m4a.

Which is wrong and which is right? Or are they both right?

[NielsLeenheer]

Should be fixed in bd9c462c18ad9e0919d9fc0a6dd77dfa663b123c I now check for both audio/aac and audio/x-m4a.