playing video automatically on ipad ios7 safari, depends on size?

Jun 16, 2014

Hello,

i've noticed this thing. i have 2 courses, both have videos into slides, one of them plays videos automatically on safari  ipad air, ios7 when exported to html5 version, the other requires user to tap on the screen to start.

So i decided to check the reason for that, and the only difference i can find is that the second course  have a bigger video (7 mb) while the first have smallest ones (small clips of about 500kb) 

Do you know if Safari on ios7 is set to automatically play videos under certain file size? 

I have founded this article that concerns about file size buffering on ios7 but i cant understand if could be somehow linked to this issue.

Thank you

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2013/04/21/html5-video-bytes-on-ios/

6 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Zio,

I haven't seen this behavior based on different sizes of your video file - but mobile Safari has some inherent limitations and may need to have a click from the user to play the video instead of playing it automatically. 

So after importing slide 1 into your second file, now slide 1 no longer plays automatically? If so, you'll want to check the triggers and slide properties to see if it's set up to play automatically - or there may be something within the second file itself. Have you tried importing the second video slide/course into a new file to see if that resolved any of the odd behavior? 

Dan Keckan

We are having the same issue Zio.  It's very frustrating.  We are also having issues with intermittent audio that sounds "tinny" or like a garbled echo.  And, we are having issues with text timing out properly to voice-over narration.

These issues began when iOS 7.1.1 released in April.  I am looking forward to when these get resolved.

Zio Fonta

hi Ashley, 

yes i copied/pasted the slide from the working project to the other and i lost the automatic play.

So i tried doing each possible modification and test each time the result.

i created a course with 2 slides putting the video on the second one. when you test the course, sometimes it plays automatically the video, sometimes not, just randomly. More often the video doesn't start if you jump forward using the menu or the next button before the end of the slide, but randomly again (i tested the same identical course several time refreshing the browser). So in my opinion this could be something related to script order loading into the html.

the fact is that in html5 version you cannot restrict the menu, so if the user try jumping between slides, the probability of creating this issue increases. The customer has decided to add always the video controls attached, so that if video stops at first frame, you will see at least the play icon. That's a pity because you are forced to insert always the video controls.

Zio Fonta

Yes Dan, as i wrote in another post, the video management after updating 5 seems to be worse than late versions. I tested the same courses on safari with ios7.1.1, with update 3 and update 5, and the second one runs slower and slower after a slide with video inside (this seems to be the main problem), so that after 10 slides it becames so slow that it loses completely the audio sync and all animations plays with a big delay. on the other side, before update 5, on ios 7 and earlier all videos never play automatically. IOS 7 introduced a "block" on autoplay for videos (as android did on last versions) to save data usage for users, that have to decide if playing or not by clicking. Update 5 solves this issue but not completely, sometimes it works and sometimes not, and i really cannot find the "gordian knot". 

We must admit that current version of safari is really obsolete, on autumn they will release a stable version of safari 8 that should be much more fast and modern, but ipad2 and maybe 3 generations could stay on ios7 so this will not solve our problems.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Zio,

Thanks for sharing the additional information here. I know our team is aware of and working on some additional issues with mobile Safari and Storyline content, so hopefully that update will be out soon and help out with some of the way data and videos are handled. If you'd like us to take a look at something specific, please always feel free to share it here and/or send it along to our Support engineers. 

Dan - I also just wanted to welcome you to the Heroes community! 

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