5 ms·

Nice to see they're getting bit by their own decisions. They've gone out of their way to ensure that you can't ever play an Audio/Video clip automatically on p

Nice to see they're getting bit by their own decisions. They've gone out of their way to ensure that you can't ever play an Audio/Video clip automatically on page load in iOS Safari. Every new iOS release for the first few years included a patch to kill any new workarounds that let you do so. (Curse you iOS 4.3 for taking away our simulated clicks.) But now they have a use case of their own that needs it, so they invent the mother of all workarounds. And now the rest of us will start using it. And it will become the "standard" way to run video on iOS Safari. Then they'll kill it off for iOS 7. Then they'll have to come up with an even crazier workaround so that they can render their own website a few months later. Fascinating to watch this play out.

tjogin 14y ago
How do you know they feel they're getting 'bit'? Maybe they think this is the optimal solution for what they are trying to accomplish? Maybe they have an internal tool for generating the images they need to accomplish these things? Maybe it's "smooth as butter", as they would say, on their side?
- archangel_one 14y ago
  There's a reason that we have video codecs like mpeg and h264 instead of using mjpeg for everything; the compression is much better. In that sense, a stream of jpegs is far from optimal, even if it's smooth as butter on a fast connection.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    I wonder what they'll do when the much better h.265 comes out.
  - tjogin 14y ago
    Yeah, so clearly they weren't trying to optimize for KB size.
batista 14y ago
>They've gone out of their way to ensure that you can't ever play an Audio/Video clip automatically on page load in iOS Safari Which sounds very wise from a user perspective. Imagine every crappy web advertiser auto playing videos on page load on Mobile Safari. Yuck. I don't want videos to auto-play on my Laptop, why would I want them on my phone? >Curse you iOS 4.3 for taking away our simulated clicks Simulated clicks? I rest my case...
- maayank 14y ago
  What do you do when that happens on your laptop? You close the page and move on. Why does it need to be any different on your mobile/tablet? I assume the battery cost of 2 seconds of video loading/playing once in a long time is negligible.
  - Uchikoma 14y ago
    I usually do not use my laptop in a restaurant.
- batista 14y ago
  >What do you do when that happens on your laptop? You close the page and move on. No, I proactively install apps such as "Click to flash" and the like to make sure this DOES NOT happen on my laptop. >Why does it need to be any different on your mobile/tablet? I assume the battery cost of 2 seconds of video loading/playing once in a long time is negligible. Because I could be anywhere surfing with my mobile/tablet, in the dentist's office or even in a meeting. I don't want pages to jump at me with video I have not requested. Ever. And I don't want web marketers to assume anything about the battery life cost of their actions on MY devices.
  - betterth 14y ago
    I disagree with the person above you's "negligible" comment. From what I understand, there is a significant battery difference for Android games between ad-supported free and ad-free paid. And the difference is due to all the extra radio usage for advertisements.
roc 14y ago
Thing is, it's not a video. It's a glorified animated gif. This has almost nothing to do with autoplay and the video tag and much more to do with a desire for a script-controllable animation. (Most obviously: they don't start playing until the animation data is loaded, so that it doesn't do the herky-jerky frame-playing during load, like actual animated gifs.)
- jonknee 14y ago
  > This has almost nothing to do with autoplay and the video tag and much more to do with a desire for a script-controllable animation. Yes it does. Apple has disallowed you to play a video on iOS without user action. So it would not be possible for the video to autoplay (even with the scroll trigger). HTML5 supports preload and has the canplaythrough event which allows you to avoid buffering. They went through this rigamarole because they have previously decided developers should not be able to do this.
  - roc 14y ago
    They went through this rigamarole because it's an animation and animated gifs aren't great.
    - jonknee 14y ago
      ... And they made it an animation because of the limitations they built into iOS.
      - roc 14y ago
        Would anyone deliver an actual video this way? Say, something with more than a few dozen frames?
        hwyfour 14y ago
        It would be unfeasible to do so. Assuming the displayed image is a reasonable size, say a dimension of 320x240, you would run out of pixel space in a jpeg due to dimension limitations after about 38 minutes @ 24fps. Granted, that's not using the manifest, just straight skipping around in the sprite. To make this anywhere near possible on a large scale would be feasible though. The easiest way would to be create the manifest while encoding the video. Take the same compression scheme but save the encoding diffs for every frame. Seems like a terrible use of time.

tjogin 14y ago

How do you know they feel they're getting 'bit'? Maybe they think this is the optimal solution for what they are trying to accomplish? Maybe they have an internal tool for generating the images they need to accomplish these things? Maybe it's "smooth as butter", as they would say, on their side?

archangel_one 14y ago
There's a reason that we have video codecs like mpeg and h264 instead of using mjpeg for everything; the compression is much better. In that sense, a stream of jpegs is far from optimal, even if it's smooth as butter on a fast connection.
- mtgx 14y ago
  I wonder what they'll do when the much better h.265 comes out.
- tjogin 14y ago
  Yeah, so clearly they weren't trying to optimize for KB size.

batista 14y ago

>They've gone out of their way to ensure that you can't ever play an Audio/Video clip automatically on page load in iOS Safari Which sounds very wise from a user perspective. Imagine every crappy web advertiser auto playing videos on page load on Mobile Safari. Yuck. I don't want videos to auto-play on my Laptop, why would I want them on my phone? >Curse you iOS 4.3 for taking away our simulated clicks Simulated clicks? I rest my case...

maayank 14y ago
What do you do when that happens on your laptop? You close the page and move on. Why does it need to be any different on your mobile/tablet? I assume the battery cost of 2 seconds of video loading/playing once in a long time is negligible.
- Uchikoma 14y ago
  I usually do not use my laptop in a restaurant.
batista 14y ago
>What do you do when that happens on your laptop? You close the page and move on. No, I proactively install apps such as "Click to flash" and the like to make sure this DOES NOT happen on my laptop. >Why does it need to be any different on your mobile/tablet? I assume the battery cost of 2 seconds of video loading/playing once in a long time is negligible. Because I could be anywhere surfing with my mobile/tablet, in the dentist's office or even in a meeting. I don't want pages to jump at me with video I have not requested. Ever. And I don't want web marketers to assume anything about the battery life cost of their actions on MY devices.
- betterth 14y ago
  I disagree with the person above you's "negligible" comment. From what I understand, there is a significant battery difference for Android games between ad-supported free and ad-free paid. And the difference is due to all the extra radio usage for advertisements.

roc 14y ago

Thing is, it's not a video. It's a glorified animated gif. This has almost nothing to do with autoplay and the video tag and much more to do with a desire for a script-controllable animation. (Most obviously: they don't start playing until the animation data is loaded, so that it doesn't do the herky-jerky frame-playing during load, like actual animated gifs.)

jonknee 14y ago
> This has almost nothing to do with autoplay and the video tag and much more to do with a desire for a script-controllable animation. Yes it does. Apple has disallowed you to play a video on iOS without user action. So it would not be possible for the video to autoplay (even with the scroll trigger). HTML5 supports preload and has the canplaythrough event which allows you to avoid buffering. They went through this rigamarole because they have previously decided developers should not be able to do this.
- roc 14y ago
  They went through this rigamarole because it's an animation and animated gifs aren't great.
  - jonknee 14y ago
    ... And they made it an animation because of the limitations they built into iOS.
    - roc 14y ago
      Would anyone deliver an actual video this way? Say, something with more than a few dozen frames?
      - hwyfour 14y ago
        It would be unfeasible to do so. Assuming the displayed image is a reasonable size, say a dimension of 320x240, you would run out of pixel space in a jpeg due to dimension limitations after about 38 minutes @ 24fps. Granted, that's not using the manifest, just straight skipping around in the sprite. To make this anywhere near possible on a large scale would be feasible though. The easiest way would to be create the manifest while encoding the video. Take the same compression scheme but save the encoding diffs for every frame. Seems like a terrible use of time.