Cannot view videos using a shared public folder

[BijanK]

I have noticed that when I share a folder via a public link in Synology Drive 2.0, videos placed in this folder cannot be viewed by users when double-clicking them.

A double-click on the video by a user (without a Drive user account) (in any browser on macOS at least) triggers a dialogue to log in to Drive. Of course, that is not what is intended here. (If I log in with a valid account, this results in an error message "Format not supported by browser". I have tried it with pretty much all the formats I know. The standard here is MP4/MOV with H.264.)

The URL that is called here is the embedded Synology Video Player at "https://diskstation.XXXXX.de/drive/?launchApp=SYNO.SDS.VideoPlayer2.Application&launchParam=...".

However, it works perfectly if the video is not played using a double-click, but instead with a right click selecting "Open in new tab". Now, the browser's inbuilt MP4 player takes over and the video is played.

Curiously, displaying other format, e.g. PDFs using the Synology PDF viewer, works just fine.

Does anyone know what causes this behaviour or how it can be solved? Are there any access rights that need to be given to the Synology Video Player for Internet users somewhere?

Thanks!

 

[Rusty]

Not much you can do about it because in scenario one you are invoking the Videoplayer app that you can't configure regarding permission. In case two, you are invoking Drives "File" API that based on your settings (allow or not downloading, streaming etc) will allow certain operations such as playing the file.

PDFs are invoking another app, PDFViewer that you cant configure regarding permissions as well, and by default, it's free-for-all, so regardless if you are "user" or "admin" or "anonymous" you will be able to get the content.

It would be best to just have that "open in new tab" as an option or, switch to a media streaming platform, but I guess that's more of a problem than a solution in this case.

I have been looking into this same problem a while back and gave up on it when I saw there was no real way to control this. Right-click works for me...

 

[fredbert]

I recall that it's worse sharing anything in Drive to a user on a mobile device as that asks them to download the Drive app. This was acknowledged by Synology support.

 

[BijanK]

Not much you can do about it because in scenario one you are invoking the Videoplayer app that you can't configure regarding permission. In case two, you are invoking Drives "File" API that based on your settings (allow or not downloading, streaming etc) will allow certain operations such as playing the file.

PDFs are invoking another app, PDFViewer that you cant configure regarding permissions as well, and by default, it's free-for-all, so regardless if you are "user" or "admin" or "anonymous" you will be able to get the content.

It would be best to just have that "open in new tab" as an option or, switch to a media streaming platform, but I guess that's more of a problem than a solution in this case.

I have been looking into this same problem a while back and gave up on it when I saw there was no real way to control this. Right-click works for me...

Thanks, Rusty! So the gist is that the PDF viewer and the video player are both embedded apps that use different kinds of access rights setting that can't be modified? Bummer. We'll, I'll stick with the right-click method, then.