The Website Saga: 4 Hours of Video Debugging

Built the entire marketing site in one day. 15 scroll-snap sections, fight demo, lootbox opener, achievement browser, revenue calculator, 16 music mood packs with visualizer, 30+ juice features.

Then the videos broke. 10 gameplay clips in the gallery — worked on desktop Chrome, randomly failed on Safari, partially worked on Firefox. Spent 4 hours debugging. Turned out to be three layered issues: shared hosting wasn't sending proper MIME types or byte-range headers (Safari refuses to play without those), all 10 videos were autoplaying simultaneously (overwhelming the server connection limit), and one filename was 148 characters long.

Added an .htaccess fix for the server headers, built a lazy-load system that only plays the visible video, and renamed the file. The debug overlay screenshot is from the trenches at 6AM.