Embedded YT on mobile: autohide=0&controls=1 but controls invisible - youtube-api

When embedding a video with autohide=0 and controls=1 (which is default anyway), one would assume the controls are always visible.
This is however not the case when looking at an embedded video on Android or iOS, where the exact same embed code yields a player without "always-on" controls (e.g. before clicking "play").
I've created a small demo which indeed has YT display the controls when viewed on desktop, but not when viewed on iOS or Android.
My questions:
Is this a bug (and if so; is a solution in the works)?
Is there another way to force the controls to be visible on mobile?

iOS Safari supports HTML5 video (it uses Quicktime to render it). Behind the scenes, the YouTube API is creating an HTML5 video element inside its iframe. There is no HTML5 attribute that specifies whether or not to keep the controls visible, therefore YouTube cannot make the controls stay visible on the iOS.
Unfortunately, at this time, I think the only solution is to build your controls and use the javascript DOM API to control the video.

Related

HTML5 videos do not play when embedded inside of a scrollable iFrame with Safari on iOS

With Safari on iOS, videos that are embedded below the fold inside of a scrollable iFrame will not begin playing when tapped. If you tap on the video multiple times, or do a long tap, the video may or may not begin playing. On the contrary, the video will play without issue as long as the video is embedded above the fold.
Here is an example showing a video not working when embedded below
the fold inside of an iframe:
https://d1wlensemu2d8.cloudfront.net/safari-bug/example.html
Here is an example showing a video working when embedded above the
fold inside of an iframe:
https://d1wlensemu2d8.cloudfront.net/safari-bug/example2.html
Here are the contents of the iframe from the first example. The video
plays fine when the content is accessed directly:
https://d1wlensemu2d8.cloudfront.net/safari-bug/iframe.html
Until the bug is resolved, one possible work-around may be to extend the height of the iFrame and make its container scrollable. However, this is less than ideal when the content is variably sized and/or contains links to other similarly hosted pages. Can anyone recommend a better solution?
This was tested on iOS 15.4 with an iPhone 12 and iPad Pro (9.7-inch).
Here is a reasonable work-around for the time being:
window.addEventListener('touchstart', function(e) {
e.preventDefault();
});

Full screen Vimeo Video Issue & YouTube Player API Reference for iframe in IE7

I have a site (which is only viewed using Internet Explorer 7) that is made up of 5 sections and in section 2 I am currently using Vimeo to embed a video. The requirement is that the user has to watch all of it before proceeding to the next section. In order to achieve this I have used event listeners which only activate the ‘Next’ button to proceed when all of the video has been watched (Works Great)
Another requirement is for users to be able to play the video in full screen but the problem I have using Vimeo is that it does not support the option to hide the progress bar when a video is playing in full screen, this allows the user to skip the video. After researching around and contacting Vimeo support I can confirm that hiding the progress bar can only be achieved when viewing the video in standard mode when you have subscribed to the pro account (which I have).
I looked into targeting the CSS classes within the iFrame, and setting a display none value on the controls div but this is something that can’t be done.
I have looked at using YouTube as an alternative and you are able to hide the progress bar in full screen using this markup
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/C0DPdy98e4c?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0?&fullscreen=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=1></iframe>
I’ve done some reading on using the YouTube Player API Reference for iframe Embeds (https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference) but it says that one of the requirements is that the user's browser must support the HTML5 postMessage feature - INTERNET EXPLORER 7 DOES NOT SUPPORT IT :(
Could anyone suggest how I can achieve this, either by hiding the progress bar using vimeo in full screen or by implementing the youTube Iframe API to work with IE7?
Cheers
Paul
I don't see a parameter to remove the controls in a Vimeo video on their page on embedding. Also, the Vimeo FAQs say that the control bar gets hidden on an embedded video when it's less than a specified number of pixels wide.
You might have to do some sneaky CSS styling stuff instead. I did manage to find an article on hiding controls on an HTML5 video when viewing it fullscreen, but it said that IE does not support the full-screen API, so I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to do is actually possible on IE.

Embedded YouTube videos don't play on iPad (iOS 7) while HTML5 search input is visible

This is a bug that I have managed to fix by brute force, but I don't understand why the solution worked.
The problem was that embedded YouTube videos weren't working on a particular (responsive) site on iPad (tested in iOS7) in landscape view. I managed to narrow it down to a particular CSS rule that was showing a search input in the header when the browser was wide enough, so it would show in an iPad's landscape view but not in its portrait view.
After a little more brute force fiddling, I found that removing the type="search" from the input tag (which causes it to fall back to the default type="text") would fix the problem. None of my searches have come up with an explanation for why this works though, or even anyone else experiencing the same thing.
Some more details on the bug
The site works by showing an image at first, which would be replaced via JavaScript with the YouTube iframe when clicked. After this first click, it would autoplay on desktop browsers, and on the iPad it would load the video but wouldn't play until the user presses it again.
If the type="search" input was visible (display: block;), then tapping on the embedded video would not cause it to play; there would be no visible response to the tap. If I zoomed in and tapped on the controls at the top, like the name of the video, I could see them being underlined, and testing showed that there was no element covering the iframe and intercepting events.
Strangely, tapping on the very edge of the right hand side of the iframe would cause the video to start playing correctly. Otherwise, changing the iPad to portrait view (causing the search input to be hidden via CSS) would enable the iframe to be clicked in order to start the video playing. After that first click, all the video controls would work regardless of whether or not the search input was showing.
Just experienced this first-hand myself and wanted to add my kudos for you having written this up. Your SO question, even without an answer, pointed me in the right direction.
In my case it was nothing to do with Youtube. I had a page generated by Drupal in a large-ish site, in which the site-wide search mechanism used an auto-complete drupal module which had type="search" as the main input's type.
In IOS, users reported that Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus's respective "like" buttons all didn't work, along with a much larger angular app embedded in the page. They all used iframes and none of them seemed to respond to clicks.
Changing this seemingly innocuous, unrelated input's type from search to text solved this problem immediately.
Baffling.

video.js breaks popcorn.js on iPad

So here's the challenge. Make a clickable popcorn link OVERLAYING the video. Simple enough on desktop, but iOS is proving to be a challenge. If the video element has the controls attribute iOS hijacks all clicks within the video window, making the link overlay un-clickable. However if the controls attribute is not present on the video element, the popcorn links are clickable and work well.
Problems is, now there are no video controls. And I need those. So I figured some hand written javascript based video controls should work out fine. No controls attribute on the video tag so popcorn overlays are clickable, plus working controls! My attempt with this is to use video.js.
So now I have video.js video controls and popcorn living in harmony on desktop. But on iPad the video.js part works, but the popcorn part doesn't anymore. I get the video.js controls, but no popcorn events fire. However there are NO ERRORS, and the script executes completely.
Does anyone know what is happening here? Why would video.js stop popcorn only on iOS? Is there a solution?
PROBLEM DEMO
VideoJS has to make changes to your web page to insert all its controls and get them positioned correctly, and that includes moving the video element around. Mobile Safari is notoriously sensitive and a little bit weird about this stuff. It looks like VideoJS is removing your original video element and replacing it with a new one, and this is happening after Popcorn has attached it self to the original.
Debugging minified Javascript on Mobile Safari is no picnic, so I can't tell exactly why VideoJS is doing this on the iPad and not other browsers. But using the console, it's possible to get a rough idea what's going on:
document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0] ===
window.Popcorn.instances[0].media
//false!
That means the video element that Popcorn is listening to is not the same one that you're seeing and playing in your web page. From this command...
window.Popcorn.instances[0].media.parentNode //null!
...you can see that the original tag exists in memory but is not attached to the DOM. So while the new video plays along, the original one is stuck paused at 0:00.
The solution is to set up your Popcorn instance after VideoJS is done doing its business. And then make sure you reference the video element properly, because now '#popacorn' references a <div>, and the new video element is called "popacorn_html5_api". That should cover you for iOS as well as desktop browsers.
I had the same problem in Firefox. Popcorn not working with videoJS.
I solved my problem like this:
jQuery(function(){
_V_('videoid').ready(function() { // videoJS ready ?
console.info('videoJS ready : player ID = '+$(this).attr('id'));
console.info('videoJS ready : videoObj ID = '+$('#videoid video').attr('id'));
var pop = Popcorn( "#"+$('#videoid video').attr('id') );
// etc...
});
});
Like said brianchirls, videoJS makes ​​a div id = "videoid" containing a video id = "videoid_html5_api", so the object id="videoid" is no longer a video object.

How can I hide/disable the fullscreen button in the iPad’s standard HTML5 video controls?

I’m writing an HTML5 page with a embedded video tag for the iPad.
How can I hide or disable the fullscreen button? I just need to show the video without the fullscreen option.
As far as I know (I could be wrong, this isn’t really my area), you can’t tell Safari how to render its standard video controls.
However, you can tell it not to render its standard video controls (at least according to the HTML5 spec) by omitting the controls attribute from the video tag.
You can then write your own play/pause controls. (See e.g. http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/video.html#markup). That’s obviously a bit more work, but I think it’s your only option.
If you don’t want to write your own controls from scratch, there are a couple of good pre-built ones out there, specifically:
Video JS
Video for Everybody
They’re more focused on providing video via HTML5 or Flash depending on browser capabilities, but you might be able to extract the control parts, or at least see how they’re doing it.

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