I've been trying to play more than one sound simultaneously in the iPad browser, and it appears that it isn't possible using raw <audio> tags. Starting one <audio> source will always pause any other playing <audio> sources, whether they were initiated via user tap on the controls, or with the .play() method.
Are there any other approaches that might work for multiple simultaneous sounds (QuickTime, <embed>, etc.)?
Apple have taken a design decision that doesn't allow you to play more than one audio file at a time. It's an intended limitation of the device I'm afraid.
Now that iOS 6 is available, WebAudio is the way to go. This is still not possible in iOS 5.
Related
As many hybrid app developers know, Apple has decided to disallow setting the volume property of HTML5 video elements in JavaScript. This also amounts to the the muted property. The concept of muted videos which autoplay when scrolled into view and with the option of unmuting on tap is growing increasingly popular (pioneered by Vine, Facebook, etc.). I'm trying to find a way around this limitation in design. From what I've been able to read on the subject, there's not any hack or solution that solves this design requirement of mine.
Here's my thoughts so far:
I could split the audio from the video into a separate stream and sync current time with the video and call play() when the user is tapping. However, iOS Safari/UiWebView does not support simultaneous audio/video streams. Thus, this is simply not an option.
I could encode two videos, one with sound and one without. I could then swap the src on tap. However, this requires reloading the entire stream and also nearly doubles the amount of data required. The latency is noticeable. Thus, this won't be a viable solution.
I could embed a native AVPlayer class element in the webview. However, this would be an overlay and not be manageable from within the webview. Custom controls and UI interaction from within the dom would not be possible. Thus, this is not an option.
I could simply disable the output of the app and dynamically switch it on whenever the user taps a video element. However, to my knowledge this is not possible. I could show the native software volume slider, but that would defeat the purpose of this whole thing.
Do you have any suggestions or ways around this limitation?
I managed to find an acceptable solution. I split the videos into three files. One without audio, one without video and then one with both video and audio for desktop browsers/Android.
It seems like running simultaneous streams CAN work as long as they doesn't conflict with each other, which basically means a separate audiotrack and a video with no audio Channels play just fine in unison.
I'm using AVAudioPlayer to play mp3 files, but I need to implement ui interface as shown following:
I think it maybe a iOS system control I can use, but I can't find which control it is.
That is an MPMoviePlayerController. Compare, for example this illustration from my book:
The same section of my book tells you how to make and work with one of these. Despite the name, it's great for playing audio with a user interface. The only difference between our screen shots is that you had an AirPlay device present on the network at the time.
I have a video composition which I'd like to play over Airplay (without mirroring). The app works as expected when using normal Airplay mirroring, but I'd like to get the speed, reliability, and resolution bump you get from using Airplay video instead.
The problem is that when I set
player.usesAirPlayVideoWhileAirPlayScreenIsActive = YES;
...the player goes blank.
Notes:
Since I don't create separate windows for each display, they are both trying to use the same AVPlayer.
My AVVideoComposition contains different files and adds opacity ramps between them.
This unanswered question suggests that the problem is more likely due to the fact that I'm playing an AVComposition than the use of a shared player: AVComposition doesn't play via Airplay Video
Two questions:
Do I have to get rid of the player on the iPad?
Can an AVVideoComposition ever be played over AirPlay?
I can't make comments so I had to post this as an answer although it might not fully respond to the questions.
I had similar issue and at the end I found out that when AVPlayer plays AVComposition it simply doesn't display anything on the external display. That's why I had to do it myself by listening to UIScreen connection notifications.
I have to say that all worked pretty perfect. I'm checking first if there are more than one screen and if there are I simply move the AVPlayer on that screen while displaying a simple message on the device's screen that content is played on... plus the name of AirPlay device. This way I can put whatever I want on the external display and is not very complicated. Same thing is when I receive UIScreenDidConnectNotification.
That was fine until I noticed that the composition plays really choppy on the the external display. Even if it consists of only one video without any complex edits or overlays. Same video plays perfectly if I save it to the Camera Roll or if I use MPMoviePlayerController.
I've tried many things like lowering resolutions, lowering renderScale and so on but with no success.
One thing bothers me more is how actually Apple do this in iMovie - if you have AirPlay enabled and you play a project (note it's still not rendered so it must use a composition in order to display it) right after tapping play button it opens a player that plays content really smoothly on the external monitor. If you however activate AirPlay from the player it closes and start rendering the project. After that it plays it I thing by using MPMoviePlayerController.
I'm still trying to find a solution and will post back if I have any success.
So for the two questions:
I don't see why you have to get rid.
Yes it can be played but with different technique and obviously issues.
in the app .plist create a new item called:
required background modes
add a new array element called:
App plays audio or streams audio/video using AirPlay
Not sure if you have already tried this, but you don't mention it in your post.
Cheers!
I'm having a small web app, which plays really short sound bits on the click of several buttons. It explicitly targets mobile Safari on iOS (iPad).
After reading here and elsewhere about the several "shortcomings" of HTML5 audio in this context on mobile Safari and trying a few "hacks" and tricks, I'm stuck with a situation where Safari seems simply (for the lack of a better word) broken:
I can play sound A (it takes a long time for it to start — I'm assuming it's downlading [again]?) on the click of button A. After that, clicking on button B will immediately play the sound A again. Same for button C. In some cases it will play a different sound, sometimes even the right one. But mostly sound A. The format in use was .aiff, is now .m4a .
After writing a few tiny versions myself, I decided to go with the Buzz library to handle the sound loading/playing/etc..
Funnily enough, their demo includes a game, which does pretty much exactly what I need and triggers the same faulty behavior. I even ended up in a situation where any audio player in mobile Safari in any tab would play a certain sound out of the Buzz demo game (!).
I was hoping a cache manifest might help overcome Apples preloading limitations and force the app to play the sound right after hitting the button in offline mode. But after confirming that the whole app had been cached, I can't play/hear any sound in offline mode.
Has anyone managed to get something like this to work somehow? (— Having seen how Apple handles certain things, I' don't expect much response, though… )
Update 1:
The example in this answer causes the same effect: How to synthesize audio using HTML5/Javascript on iPad
Update 2:
Updating iOS (and so Safari) seems to resolve the audio bug. The cache manifest doesn't seem to effect audio files, though. These files are just not available at all.
After removing the cache manifest the app works okay, but adding it to the "home screen" and reloading it prevents the audio from playing as well.
I wish I could tell you there's a magic formula to get all your html5 media to work perfectly, but there isn't. Mobile support for HTML5 audio/video is pretty poor right now; much further behind than its desktop predecesors. To make matters worse, each of the different platforms handle it differently and most of them only support it in semi-recent versions.
However, there are some tricks you can employ to get media files to work correctly in mobile Safari. In order to explain them, you'll need to understand some of its shortcomings.
1) You can't load multiple audio / video files
Its been my experience that the browser will only load one file at a time. If you play one file, go and play another, and then come back and it'll just load that file all over again. And, although I didn't try it myself, I don't believe a cache manifest will help you here.
What I had to do is combine all my audio files into one large audio file. Then, depending on which audio track was requested, I'd move the play position to the appropriate starting position and play that track. Then, I'd use a setInterval to examine the playback every few milliseconds to determine if the current play position hit the end of the track. Once it did, I paused it. Pluis, I gave myself a few seconds (2-3) between each track, just in case the phone's CPU was under a lot of load and checked the feed a little too late.
2) You can't auto-play audio / video files
Apple built into their HTML5 media tag technology the limitation that these tracks would only load and play in response to a user click event. That way, developers couldn't auto-play annoying tracks when you went to their websites.
When I was using audio/video tags, I was trying to build a rich media advertisement. So I hooked my audio/tracks loading to the banner click event, when you click a banner and expand the advertisement.
What I'd suggest you should do is have a small lightbox popup come up, asking the user if they want to turn on/off sound. You can attach your load functions to the click event of that popup box, regardless if the user turns the sound on or off.
Personally, I didn't have much luck using the load() function. I'd run that function to load the audio and then click play and it would just load it again. It could have always been that I just didn't do it right, so feel free to prove me wrong and get that working. What did is I told the track to play, so that way it would start loading, and then I'd use a setInterval to see if the current play time incremented just a few milliseconds. Once I noticed that it started to play the track, I'd immediately pause it.
3) Audio/Video tags are only supported in iOS 4.0 and higher
There's no trick to getting around this. Its just the facts.
Here's a few sites that helped when when I was developing with audio/video tags:
http://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/video
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/video.html#media-elements
Good luck!
I'm trying to create an HTML5 video player to automatically start streaming video. I searched a lot but I didn't achieve my goal.
Then I found www.filmon.com, where all videos start to play automatically on iPad.
Does anyone know how they did it? I looked at their JS files, but I cannot make mine start automatically.
Apple has specifically disabled every method and workaround to autoplay video on iPads and iPhones (the "autoplay" attribute, and Javascript solutions like triggering hidden link's "onclick" event).
I have yet to find a way to autoplay on iPads and it looks like Apple is continuing to squash all efforts to do it. They state, "In Safari on iPhone OS (for all devices, including iPad), where the user may be on a cellular network and be charged per data unit, autobuffering and autoplay are disabled. No data is loaded until the user initiates it."
As a quick update I just checked out Filmon.com and the videos there no longer seem to be autoplaying on an iPad. Example: http://demand.filmon.com/distant-roads-173-cnd-ontario-ca-1 autoplays on Chrome, but not on the iPad.
I don't think that iphone or ipad play streams automatically due to high traffic.
Why don't you play it manually using script at document ready?
somewhat like this:
window.onload=function(){
var audio = document.getElementById('audio');
audio.play();
}