iOS Safari Fullscreen Problems

Hello there,

Greetings and thank you for choosing Presto!

1. We’ve checked, and it is working on our end. If possible, could you share a screenshot? That would be greatly appreciated.

2. In the meantime, you can use the “play inline” feature to prevent this issue.

Hope this information is helpful. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Best Regards,
Paula

Hi Paula,

thank you for your quick response!

Here you can see the double controls: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hg7CtVzlLdla-zJAV-wcFK2MYJlXdLuy/view?usp=share_link

Here you can see the top and bottom bar in presto full screen: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16L_2sYduXwEaP7aGEqFA1OJuE1yzEFpz/view?usp=sharing

And here you can see both issues: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hL-xsJAb9QlIOnUKR7SFjs4RBCETQEAh/view?usp=sharing

I reported this bug back in June 2023. We’re not using Presto Player for videos anymore, but it’s anyways worrying to hear that the bug hasn’t been addressed six months (!) later.

Thanks for bringing this issue back up. The reason this issue is still not addressed is due to restrictions on iOS, not due to lack of care about the issue. Let me explain a little more:

1. Full Screen Top Bar: iOS does not have a fullscreen API, so we are accomplishing this through css. This means we cannot programmatically hide the top bar in that fashion, so this is not currently possible.
2. Turning off playinline shows double controlsThis is because we are using the native iOS player here, instead of ours. That’s what turning off playinline does. The trade-off here, is that iOS locks this so that we don’t have a way to turn off controls . The reason this issue has not changed is that it is impossible to solve due to iOS restrictions.

However, iOS is very close to offering a fullscreen API, which would solve both issues. However, it is not yet released, and keep in mind this will only be supported in newer versions of iOS.

I hope this helps – I don’t want you to think that we don’t care about this issue, it’s that it’s not currently solvable.

Any questions, let me know.

Hi Andre,

Thank you very much for explaining the difficulties with those issues. I was expecting, that it was something about iOS restrictions.

The only thing I am wondering then is, why the bunny.net native player does not have those issues on iOS? It switches fluently between their inline player and the iOS full screen player. The same with the YouTube player.

It’s a great question @mirrorfzen. What bunny.net is doing here is switching to the native player for fullscreen. We can do this too, but that means many specific presto player features are no longer available, including overlays, chapters, watermarks, searchable captions etc.

However, should you want to switch this functionality, you can do so with a code snippet:

add_action(
	'wp_footer',
	function () { ?>
	<script>
		jQuery(function() {
			if (!wp || !wp.hooks) return;
			wp.hooks.addFilter('presto.playerSettings', 'ios-native-fullscreen', function(settings) {
				settings.fullscreen = { enabled: true, fallback: true, iosNative: true, container: null };
				return settings;
			});
		});
	</script>
		<?php
	}
);

And make sure playinline is on. Just be aware of the tradeoffs that the native player is being used on fullscreen mode, whereas Presto Player is being used on inline.

Hi Andre,

thank you for your answer. The code snippet you provided works out great!

I do understand your concerns about the lack of features in the iOS native player, but for someone like me who does not need any of those features, but definitely wants a true full screen experience, it would be nice to have a video setting (like below the “Play inline”), that enables exactly the code you just provided and informs about the features one is giving up for that.

I would consider this rather important, because in this area your player is acting fundamentally different from every other player and you do not inform your customers about this.

Greetings

Thank you very much, @2winfactor.

It’s a tough decision @mirrorofzen.

On the one hand I do agree with you. On the other, I think customers would be surprised if many of the presto player features were not working on mobile devices with fullscreen. We decided that we were okay with the tradeoff of the top bar being visible, and controls being visible when minified, if that meant keeping the same experience across devices. But perhaps we will add a global setting for this so that someone could decide the other way.

I will resolve this for now, but any other thoughts, please let me know.