1827371 - Play video in the background with the screen off (like "Video Background Play Fix" add-on)

Status: REOPENED

(GeckoView :: Media, enhancement, P3)

Description

[eclaudiu64]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 11; Mobile; rv:109.0) Gecko/112.0 Firefox/112.0

Steps to reproduce:

• I have the following active add-on: Play video in the background and the Auto play video and audio settings in firefox options.

1. Enter the mobile version of YouTube on the following link: https://m.youtube.com/feed/explore
2. Select a video from the list and play.
3. Turn off the phone screen while videos are playing in the background.
4. When the phone screen is off and the selected video ends, the next video does not play automatically, even if the autoplay option is enabled in youtube settings.

Actual results:

The next video does not play automatically.

Expected results:

Have the next video play automatically with the phone turned off.

Comment 1

[eclaudiu64]

Attachment: Screenshot_20230411-104208_Brave.jpg

Brave Browser has this option. Can you do this in Firefox too? It's a useful setting.

Comment 3

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Reopening this bug because it's a feature request, not a duplicate of bug 1827583.

I thought that background playback of YouTube audio used to work. Did that change?

Comment 4

[eclaudiu64]

(In reply to Chris Peterson [:cpeterson] from comment #3)

Reopening this bug because it's a feature request, not a duplicate of bug 1827583.

I thought that background playback of YouTube audio used to work. Did that change?

This issue is pretty much the same as this ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1812957
It was originally posted as a duplicate of the Picture-in-Picture PIP issue on youtube, but I think it's unrelated and separate, and there should be improvements on the screen-off background playback side of either website.

Comment 5

[Makoto Kato [:m_kato]]

When I test this, I cannot reproduce this on Firefox Nightly with Pixel 6a (Android 13). Although autoplay works after screen is off by timeout.

Comment 6

[eclaudiu64]

(In reply to Makoto Kato [:m_kato] from comment #5)

When I test this, I cannot reproduce this on Firefox Nightly with Pixel 6a (Android 13). Although autoplay works after screen is off by timeout.

I also tested without the Play video in the background extension, accessing the link from this ticket, after entering the list of open tabs, pressing the media playback button from the open tab (YouTube), after entering another tab and turning off the screen and the video plays in the background with the screen closed until the video ends, then the next video does not follow immediately, sometimes it takes a long time for several minutes before the next video is played (without opening the phone screen), or no video is played in the background at all, being the closed screen of the phone. We tested with e phone models and no battery or app restrictions. This request is to implement a special setting, like in Brave browser, Brave has a setting that works properly any background video from YouTube with the screen closed and I even tested the steps in this ticket and the next video plays automatically after a second.

Comment 7

[eclaudiu64]

We tested with the following phone models: Samsung A20E and Moto E7 Plus.

Comment 8

[eclaudiu64]

(In reply to eclaudiu64 from comment #1)

Created attachment 9327891 [details]
Screenshot_20230411-104208_Brave.jpg

Brave Browser has this option. Can you do this in Firefox too? It's a useful setting.

Will consider implementing a different option, to be implemented in the Firefox settings? It would need to work properly in the browser in full, the "Play video in the background" add-on is not as functional in the background as the setting in the Brave browser.

Comment 9

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Will consider implementing a different option, to be implemented in the Firefox settings? It would need to work properly in the browser in full, the "Play video in the background" add-on is not as functional in the background as the setting in the Brave browser.

The "Video Background Play Fix" add-on seems like a safer approach, since it works by disabling the Page Visibility API only on youtube.com. Disabling this API on all websites might cause other problems. But I will leave this bug open as an enhancement request.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/

https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play