kWidget - Issue with mobile devices not auto playing

Hi,

We have used the kWidget to embed the Kaltura player into our website. Our website is viewed both on desktop and mobile devices by our clients. However whilst the player works perfectly for Desktops it appears to “buffer” on mobile devices.

On closer inspection though we think there is a problem with the player and that it is not a buffering issue as reported by our clients. If the video in question is left to autoplay, the loading icon continues to be displayed forever without actually triggering the player to play. If we have chapters and select chapter 1 we get the same issue, a continuous loading icon.

However if we open the player, click any other chapter other than the first and then immediately click chapter 1 again the video plays instantly. This would seem to suggest that some sort of play event is not being initiated at video start and is only fired once we go beyond the first part of the video.

Our widget is currently set with these options:

            window.kWidget.embed({
                   "targetId": "video-window",
                   "wid": "_" + mydata.pid,
                   "uiconf_id": mydata.uid,
                   "entry_id": eid,
                  "flashvars": { 'streamerType': 'auto', 'leadWithHTML5': true, 'sideBarContainer.plugin': true, 'sideBarContainer.postition': 'left', 'sideBarContainer.clickToClose': true, 'chapters.plugin': true, 'chapters.layout': 'vertical', 'chapters.thumbnailRotator': false, 'streamSelector.plugin': true, 'EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget': 'videoHolder', 'dualScreen.plugin': true },
                  'readyCallback': function (playerId) {
                     // AutoPlay: issue a play on mediaReady
                     var kdp = document.getElementById(playerId);
                     kdp.kBind('mediaReady', function () {
                     kdp.sendNotification('doPlay');
                  });
               } 
});

Can anyone tell me if this is a common issue or whether we have missed a trick?

Hi David,
Mobile devices do not support video auto-play. This is an intentional limitation coming from the OS itself, preventing unintentional bandwidth consumption. Trying to auto-play on a mobile device using all kind of “tricks” usually results in an endless buffer screen or black screen. You can read more about it on the web, for example:

Amir

Hi Amir,

Are you saying then that I should have some sort of conditional statement in the callback function to check if this is a mobile device and then to just display a “play” button instead?

The player does that automatically for you. If you set the player’s autoPlay property to true, it will auto play on desktop and display the play button on mobile devices.

Since new browsers, as Chrome 53 for Android (https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/07/autoplay) and Safari for iOS 10.x (https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/ ), support muted autoplay also inline, Kaltura has planned to support the silent autoplay on mobile device, also plays inline, for Android and iOS?

thanks

I’m haunted by the fact that youtube in mobile autoplays any video in any platform, it’s something that browsers let youtube do? Do Google pays apple to autoplay in webkit safari in IOS i can’t figure it out.