Android – avoid the native fullscreen video player with HTML5 on iPhone or android

androidfullscreenhtmliphonevideo

I've built a web app that uses the HTML5 tag and JavaScript code that renders other content synchronized with the running video. It works great in desktop browsers: Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. On an iPhone or a DroidX, the native video player pops up and takes over the screen, thus obscuring the other dynamic content that I want to display simultaneously with the video.

Is there any way around this? If necessary, I'll figure out how to write native apps for both those platforms, but it would save me a ton of effort if I could just stick with HTML5/JavaScript.

Best Answer

In iOS 10+

Apple enabled the attribute playsinline in all browsers on iOS 10, so this works seamlessly:

<video src="file.mp4" playsinline>

In iOS 8 and iOS 9

Short answer: use iphone-inline-video, it enables inline playback and syncs the audio.

Long answer: You can work around this issue by simulating the playback by skimming the video instead of actually .play()'ing it.

Related Solutions

Html – Submitting a form by pressing enter without a submit button

Notice
Please do not use this in the year 2021+. Look down below and pick a better - more modern - answer.

Try:

<input type="submit" style="position: absolute; left: -9999px"/>

That will push the button waaay to the left, out of the screen. The nice thing with this is, you'd get graceful degradation when CSS is disabled.

Update - Workaround for IE7

As suggested by Bryan Downing + with tabindex to prevent tab reach this button (by Ates Goral):

<input type="submit" 
       style="position: absolute; left: -9999px; width: 1px; height: 1px;"
       tabindex="-1" />

HTML5 inline video on iPhone vs iPad/Browser

Right,

I was going nowhere with this and filed a bug with Apple.

After a couple of weeks they got back to me saying, very simply, that I should add "webkit-playsinline" to the video tag on the HTML, as well as adding the "allowsInlineMediaPlayback" property on the UIWebView.

So in the end, this is what it looks like:

HTML

<video id="player" width="480" height="320" webkit-playsinline>

Obj-C

webview.allowsInlineMediaPlayback = YES;

And all works just fine :)

Hope this helps someone, as it's virtually undocumented and the only place I could find a reference to "webkit-playsinline" was in the iAds reference, where it says: "iAds JS only".