Make videos playable inline on Safari on iPhone (prevents automatic fullscreen)

This lets you:

• Play videos without forcing the fullscreen on the iPhone (demo)
• Play silent videos without user interaction
• Autoplay silent videos with the autoplay attribute (demo)
• Play multiple silent videos at the same time

• ~1KB, standalone (no frameworks required)
• No setup: include it, call makeVideoPlayableInline(video), done
• No custom API for playback, you can just call video.play() on click
• Supports audio
• Supports autoplay on silent videos
• Doesn't need canvas
• Doesn't create new elements/wrappers
• It works with existing players like jPlayer

Limitations:

• Needs user interaction to play videos with sound (standard iOS limitation)
• Currently limited to iPhone, untested on Android, unneeded on iPad
• The video framerate depends on requestAnimationFrame, so avoid expensive animations and similar while the video is playing. Try stats.js to visualize your page's framerate
• Known issues

npm install --save iphone-inline-video

import makeVideoPlayableInline from 'iphone-inline-video';

If you don't use node/babel, include this:

<script src="dist/iphone-inline-video.browser.js"></script>

You will need:

• a <video> element

   <video src="file.mp4"></video>

• the native play buttons will still trigger the fullscreen, so it's best to hide them (without breaking the video controls)

   .IIV::-webkit-media-controls-play-button,
   .IIV::-webkit-media-controls-start-playback-button {
       opacity: 0;
       pointer-events: none;
       width: 5px;
   }

• the activation call

   // one video
   var video = document.querySelector('video');
   makeVideoPlayableInline(video);

   // or if you're already using jQuery:
   var video = $('video').get(0);
   makeVideoPlayableInline(video);

   // or if you have multiple videos:
   $('video').get().forEach(makeVideoPlayableInline)

Done! It will only be enabled on iPhones and iPod Touch devices.

Now you can keep using it just like you would on a desktop. Run video.play(), video.pause(), listen to events with video.addEventListener() or $(video).on(), etc...

BUT you still need user interaction to play the audio, so do something like this:

makeVideoPlayableInline(video);
video.addEventListener('touchstart', function () {
	video.play();
});

If at some point you want to open the video in fullscreen, use the standard (but still prefixed) webkitEnterFullScreen() API, but it has some caveats.

If your video file doesn't have an audio track, then you need this:

makeVideoPlayableInline(video, /* hasAudio */ false);

You can also have silent videos autoplay. This module can load and play the video without user interaction, but not play the audio, so you have to set the hasAudio to false

makeVideoPlayableInline(video, /* hasAudio */ false);

Once that's run, if video has the autoplay attribute, it will automatically start playing:

<video autoplay muted src="video.mp4"></video>

MIT © Federico Brigante