.mp4s not playing? anyone else have this issue?

Studio
#1

So during some testing my supervisor noticed a bug and I was wondering if anyone else experienced something similar

He’s got an iPhone running iOS15, and this was in WebAR. No other devices tested (iOS or Android) replicated the bug.

Basically, the experience has video planes that become visible and play once the user taps the correct spot. The bug is that the video never appears/plays. I thiiink based on the video recording he sent me, the video plane becomes visible, it just won’t play for some reason.

If it works correctly on all other devices, I’m not sure if there’s anything I can do to fix it. Would that be a correct assumption?

#2

Hi @abiro,

Sounds like it’s probably a Safari bug / quirk. Do you know how many videos are in the experience overall (are there more than 1)?

I know Safari doesn’t allow 2 videos to play simultaneously if the device is in low power mode (which iOS devices turn on automatically now under 20% battery).

Also Safari only allows unmuted videos if the call to play them happens from a HTML element interaction. If audio is an issue as well then this is probably why your first video audio will play, but if you have more than one, they won’t.

If you have the experience to share, please feel free and we’ll take a look.

George

#3

There’s 10 alpha .mp4s in that experience, all without audio since I handled that separately as .oggs called during the same pointerdown event, and the rest of the animations were all handled inside of studio.

I don’t think we were able to reliably recreate the bug though, and I know my supervisor rarely actually closed out of the WebAR tag—he would just hit refresh to get the updated version. We figured maybe it had something to do with that.

If I run into it again, I’ll reach out via the support email with the file for you guys to take a look :slight_smile: I have some revisions to make for the client, so I’ll be nosing around the file myself again as well.

#4

Hi Abiro, I usually use this method:
1- add at the end of the deeplink &_vids=6 (if the videos are six)
2- if your experience needs a music background, put it as .ogg and as a subsymbol, not in the main parent
3- sometimes little video effects works better in .ogv format
All these 3 workarounds fix every video bug in IOS…

Hope this helps!
Best,
Marco

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#5

Hey @zappar1, could you give me some insight on what the _vids parameter is doing? I have an experience with 10 videos where one video that used to loop is now broken. When I add _vids=10 it doesn’t solve my video not playing and the whole experience starts stuttering badly whenever another video is playing.

#6

Hi @joshua,

Safari only allows unmuted videos if the call to play them happens from a HTML element interaction. This is why your first video audio will play, but if you have more than one, they won’t.

You can set the number of videos that will play without a source and then set the source later using the vids query string in the URL of the deep-link or QR code.

You might see some impact on performance due to the number of videos being setup to play.

If possible, we recommend having 1 video player / video texture in your scene and updating the source when it’s needed. This isn’t possible if you need more than one video to play at the same time.

Hope this helps.

George

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