How mobile YouTube page autoplay videos on iOS? - javascript

I'm trying to get it understand but after 2 days of digging the code I thought that I will post my issue here...
According to Apple's documentation, autoplaying videos on iOS devices cannot be done without user interaction first (e.g. tap on video). Despite that, mobile YouTube (m.youtube.com) is able to autoplay its videos just after loading a page with video.
Does anyone know how they are doing it?
PS. I've checked all available JS/HTML techniques of autoplaying videos on website on iOS (e.g. iframe, fake click, triggering touch event on video, fetching video with XHR).

I believe that youtube.com is a single page app. So when the user clicks on the video from the list view the page is not loading and their javascript uses that initial click, that leads to the video page, as the click that starts the video. It's not actually autoplaying, it's just a trick.

Related

External play button iPad

Is it possible to make an external play button for a video without the play button in the video?
For example when you want to start a youtube video you see a red button in the middle of it. I want that hidden and a button outside of the video to start the video. It doesn't matter what video player it is.
I want to do this because iPad does not allow autoplay. And using the external button I want to trick it to autoplay.
This is a website that does "autoplay" on the iPad.
http://24hoursofhappy.com/
There is a reason why YouTube doesn't allow autoplay on mobile/tablet devices, video's use up alot of bandwith which may become expensive for the user.
U can trick it like u mentioned with a custom play button or even force it to start playing without a custom button. There is alot of detailed information on YouTube's API page.
Check out this page: https://developers.google.com/youtube/
I'd refrain from always autoplaying a video though if not just for bandwith reasons. In your case u could check if the device is a tablet.
I finally found an answer for this using HTML5 videos. It allows me to use the control buttons externally so I can use an overlay and hide the overlay when the play button is clicked so it will seem like it is auot played.

Vimeo on mobile platform questions

I am using oembed to work with some vimeo videos but I am having a few issues on mobile platforms.
For example, on Android, if I click on the video, the screen goes black and I have to tap again to get the controls to show then you can hit play.
When the video completes, it just sits there and you have to hit the back button.
Additionally once you hit the back button, the thumbnail of the video on the original page is grey and no longer shows the proper vimeo thumbnail.
so, I am having a host of issues and am not really sure where to start. Do I need to work with vimeo's javascript API to make the video behave how I want on mobile?
How do I make it autoplay on tap?
Can I make it automatically return to the page upon completion?
Any insight on the strange greyed out thumbnail?
If someone could point me in the right direction I would appreciate it.

Autoplay video element on mobile browser

I have read that autoplay was not possible, or not advised on both iOS and Android (more on that here: no autoplay in iframe HTML5 player on mobile (Android Chrome and Firefox)?). But I was wondering if there was a way that would allow to replicate the same behavior, that is the video playing soon as the page is loaded.
I have tried preloading the video, and playing it once the DOM is loaded, I tried forcing a play soon as the video can be played, none of that work, it always result in the user having to tap the video to play it.
Can anyone help?
NB: I'm working with plain old JavaScript, no jQuery.
No, there is no way on iOS/Safari (or iBooks).
Videos load only in the context of an event handler reacting to user action such as a touch.
You're out of luck.
This has been documented extensively in any number of questions right here on SO, and is clearly documented by Apple.

Running YouTube video in iOS 6 by clicking JavaScript button

I am creating an iPad app for running YouTube video using IFrame.
I referred to many questions regarding YouTube integration in UIWebView and understand that:
Autoplay is not possible
Apple doesn't allow to run video without user interaction (starting).
In my simple app, I have a JavaScript button in the first page, and in the next page integrated YouTube with IFrame.
If I click on the JavaScript button, is there any way to pass this click event to the next page for running YouTube?
Is event bubbling in HTML helps this?
As far as I know no, you can't do anything about it. Event triggering can be easily simulated (some example) without user interaction which can't work on iOS devices (because of the policy you mentioned).
iOS video tag (used by YouTube in this case) is handled by iOS browser. Mobile version is showing placeholder with play button which you need to 'tap'. And only this action can play the video. Notice that you can't even overlay video tag with anything, because it will simply not work.

Making Youtube Stop Playing When Popover Is Dismissed, Or Using Javascript Youtube Controls

So I've run into some problems implementing YouTube videos in popovers. I can get the YouTube video to play just fine, but when the user clicks off the popover (destroying it), the sound continues playing. My solution for this was to have the webview that was displaying the youtube video load a blank html string in the viewDidDisappear method, and this works great.
However, I am now running into an issue where if the user pushes the fullscreen button on the youtube video, the youtube video does indeed go fullscreen, but the popover is in front of it. This is annoying, but the user could normally just click some other portion of the screen and it goes away. I would be willing to live with this. Except of course.....that calls viewDidDisappear, loading nothing into the html, blowing up my entire application.
I was wondering if anyone knew how to load some javascript in the webview that could control the youtube video. In this way, I could have viedDidDiappear call the pause, so the sound would not continue playing when the popover is dismissed, and the youtube video would not blow up in full screen.
This is not the ideal solution (since the popover still sits in the way in full screen), but I will take it for now. If anyone could help with the javascript injection I would need, or suggest an even better solution, I would greatly appreciate it.

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