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  • Background audio toggle breaks iOS picture-in-picture/overlay video and has other issues

  • BugsMobilePlanned

When background audio is disabled through the toggle in the settings...

  • exiting a full screen video by doing the home action temporarily places the video in pip mode, but then closes it.

When background audio enabled…

  • Stopping a full screen video and doing the home action will start audio playback again.
  • audio playback of non-full-screen videos is inconsistent.
  • Opening a tab of a YouTube video in the background autoplays the video in the background tab but YouTube itself mutes the video. This causes excessive load. (I think that this is limited to YouTube desktop, but probably occurs on other sides that do a similar thing)
    • I have not been able to get any auto play blocking extensions of any kind to work.
    • this issue did not occur in older versions of the Orion browser on iOS.
  • Background audio of videos will sometimes start audio playback after an extended period while backgrounded for no apparent reason - I have had this occur after about 10 minutes with no audio playback.
  • if it was just toggled on - it does not work without dismissing the app from the task switcher and opening it again (or behaves as described in the first section).
  • when switching back to the app, from video that was full screened, but then backgrounded and played as background audio without visible video (for example: play video, full screen it, hit the screen off button, audio continues, unlock device into orion) will result in a black video playback screen. Controls work but the audio continues to play with no video until the user exits full screen and then resumes playback.
    • This might (inconsistent?) require more set up, like tapping on a notification from the lock screen to drop you into a different app, while a full screen video is playing as background audio.
    • or as a background audio for a period of time greater than a few seconds.
  • Sometimes (observed on the YouTube desktop site) there are strange interactions. For example a video can play and [for some reason] it will automatically full screen itself. When exiting the full screen video the background audio mode [seems to be the culprit and] triggers playback to start again... except it's video so the video starts playing, which then triggers that automatic full screen. I have several times encountered a situation where I could not regain control of the app except by dismissing it through the task switcher. (Note that YouTube desktop loads different varients of the YouTube page based on viewport width / as presented with custom zoom level / device resolution / whether the device is in portrait or landscape mode at initial session load time. I have only experienced this specific issue when loading youtube desktop from landscape.)

A previous version of the app had a different setting than "enable background audio" that I cannot quite recall. The interactions with that feature did not have these failure modes.

I believe there also used to be a more aggressive option on the loading of background tabs that I used to keep backgrounded videos from loading, so the background tab muted invisible video playback load did not occur.

A solution like a toggle to block all media /video that is not in the current tab would solve the load issue.

A toggle to block global auto play of video/media would solve some of these.

A toggle to allow pip video mode but also block background playback of audio-only would be a solution.

Technically, changing the toggle to say disable background audio and video would solve the most minor issue in this bug report.

1.3.14 (9) (WebKit 8620.1.16.10.11 on 18.2

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    I believe YouTube disables pip/overlay mode in a way that the normal Safari browser follows, but that Orion does not - which is the correct thing to do – please never update the Orion browser in a way that breaks pip of YouTube videos. I'm not in the habit of playing a lot of media on other website websites so I only have reported issues I have seen on YouTube.

    ... also something about the most recent Orion update broke ad blocking at least for the desktop YouTube site. It's still kind of works on the YouTube mobile site.... I can't make the full report about that now because it's complex to test and isolate and requires exiting and reopening Orion because sometimes the extensions don't load, and eventually YouTube just lets a video play with no ad so there are a lot of false positives.... however I am quite confident that all other details reported in this bug report do not depend on any extensions, though I do have the Orion ad blocking enabled. -- Ad blocking is still possible even with the newest flavor of youtube's anti-ad-blocking measures, for example via Ublock origin while running a Firefox Desktop browser. previously, on older versions of Orion, this worked with some very odd glitches like ads playing the first second 10 times and then the video playing. Now it just seems broken. like I said though, this is extremely difficult to debug.

      and then I triggered a new highly complex scenario that combined several of these.

      I had a Full screen video playing in Orion, I paused it, and I locked my phone. Audio did not resume playing in the background. Several minutes later I heard a brief squaw as if it had very briefly played some of the audio. I then .... misplaced my phone and used a button on a wearable to make it ding - the phone on the lock screen simultaneously began Audio playback of that background video and the find phone noise. Then I unlocked the phone from that notification. The video appeared in a pip Box but with no video, the pause button didn't work, and hitting the X to close the video did not stop playback. When I opened orion the video was still playing in black mode until I hit pause and play again.

        I am only using youtube in mobile mode, but I, too, experienced the recent update breaking picture-in-picture on youtube. Right now, to keep in playing I start the playback, go to a new tab, and then minimize Orion (I was, until now, unaware of the background playback option in the settings).

        It might be nice to have a toggle to always keep PiP videos playing when exiting Orion, to override the behaviour imposed by some websites.

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