react-native-video: [iOS] Next video does not play while in background

Bug

Only tested in iOS.

If the app is in the foreground, setting a new source will update the player and a new video begins to play.

If the app is in the background, setting a new source does cause the onLoadStart and onLoad events to fire, but the next video does not play until the app is brought back into the foreground.

Environment info

react: 16.8.6
react-native: 0.60.0

Library version: 5.0.0

Steps To Reproduce

Setup a player with background audio, and a video source of your choice.
Programmatically change the source to a different video. (Using setTimeout is probably the best bet due to the nature of this issue).
Observe how the player changes the video.
Repeat steps 1 - 2, but after the first video begins to play put the app into the background by going to the home screen or locking the device.
Observe how the player does not automatically play the next video.
Open the app up, observe how the player immediately begins playing the next video source.

Describe what you expected to happen:

In either foreground or background mode, the video should change when the source prop updates.

Reproducible sample code

const [uri, setUri] = useState("https://myvideo.com/one.mpeg");

setTimeout(() => setUri("https://myvideo.com/two.mpeg"), 10000);

return <Video
    ignoreSilentSwitch="ignore"
    playInBackground
    playWhenInactive
    source={{ uri }}
    onLoad={handleLoad}
    onLoadStart={handleLoadStart}
/>

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 5 years ago
Comments: 30 (5 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Hey @tannguyen05. Open RCTVideo.m Add this code somewhere inside the class(before “end”)

- (BOOL)canBecomeFirstResponder {
    return YES;
}

Also, check out the applicationDidEnterBackground, applicationWillEnterForeground methods and add 1 line:

- (void)applicationDidEnterBackground:(NSNotification *)notification
{
  [[UIApplication sharedApplication] beginReceivingRemoteControlEvents]; // add this line!
  if (_playInBackground) {
    // Needed to play sound in background. See https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/qa/qa1668/_index.html
    [_playerLayer setPlayer:nil];
  }
}

- (void)applicationWillEnterForeground:(NSNotification *)notification
{
  [[UIApplication sharedApplication] endReceivingRemoteControlEvents]; // add this line!
  [self applyModifiers];
  if (_playInBackground) {
    [_playerLayer setPlayer:_player];
  }
}

It should look something like this Let me know if this helped 😃

polnikale on Dec 14, 2020

I’ve seems like been able to fix the issue. The issue was that it worked OK, but [AVPlayer play] didn’t work at all when the device was locked no matter what. After some digging I was able to find a question on StackOverflow, mentioning how to fix this behavior https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11515883/playing-avaudio-from-ipod-library-while-device-is-locked We need to manually call [[UIApplication sharedApplication] beginReceivingRemoteControlEvents]; to be able to control this [AVPlayer play] when device is locked. Also, obviously, we need to call [[UIApplication sharedApplication] endReceivingRemoteControlEvents]. I’ve put these lines into didEnterBackground/willEnterForeground. It’s also important to add

- (BOOL)canBecomeFirstResponder {
    return YES;
}

I’m not sure if it breaks anything. On our side, everything seems to work as before. @CHaNGeTe what do you think about this? Is it going to break anything? If not, I would be pleased to confirm a PR to fix this annoying bug 😃

polnikale on Sep 2, 2020

@CHaNGeTe

I checked out https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-video/pull/1787. While it didn’t fix this particular issue, it didn’t appear to break anything else.

I tried this inside - (void)setSrc:(NSDictionary *)source, but maybe it wasn’t exactly what you were suggesting:

dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_DEFAULT, 0), ^{

instead of

dispatch_after(dispatch_time(DISPATCH_TIME_NOW, (int64_t) 0), dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{

I experienced the same behavior.

rorygarand on Nov 14, 2019