Mjpeg broken on recent Mobile Safari?

Question

I am playing with live mjpeg streams from IP cameras and found that support for mjpeg seems to be broken on recent Mobile Safari releases.

I am using a simple HTML test page with an embedded image as follows:

<img src="http://[ip_address]/[path]">

This works fine on an iPhone 4S with iOS 5.1, but doesn't show anything on an iPad with iOS 7.0.3.

Can someone confirm this? Any known workarounds?

Answer 1

MJPEG support on iPhone (and on OSX also) has been often broken in the past, and I can confirm that right now I'm having the same problem with MJPEG streams on my iPhone 5, version 7.0.4.

You can find some threads talking about this problem in the apple website, dating from mid 2013 and with a few recent answers, like this one https://discussions.apple.com/message/22933450#22933450

This one posts a possible solution, if you can control the stream: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4347848

I have not tried if this solution works, because I can't change the stream itself.

And the problem was also on OSX Lion : https://discussions.apple.com/message/19028348#19028348

They say it has been fixed in OSX, and that some bug reports has been filed for ios, but can't find if and when they will be fixed.

I can't find it again, but in a comment someone speculate that MJPEG support was disabled/limited on purpose on iPhone because some users had their mobile bandwidth consumed when forgetting mobile safari connected to a site streaming mjpeg images, but can't find a reference to that claim.