How can I autoplay media in iOS >= 4.2.1 Mobile Safari?

Question

I cannot seem to get audio media to play in Mobile Safari on iOS 4.2.1 in any situation other than the handler of a click event performed by the user. Even then, if player.play() is called in any asynchronous fashion (ajax, setTimeout, etc) it doesn't work.

I've tried calling player.load() before player.play(). I've tried triggering a click event on a dom element whose handler calls player.play(). I've tried using both audio and video tags.

All the loopholes that worked prior to iOS 4.2.1 seem to be closed. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Starting from iOS 4.2.x, the download of media will not be started if there isn’t a user-input event, like touchstart.

So the answer is no, there is no method to autoplay media by JavaScript or something else.

Answer 2

There is one way to play the video/audio file automatically on 4.2.1. Create an iframe and set its source to the media file's URL and append the iframe to the body. It'll be autoplay.

var ifr=document.createElement("iframe"); ifr.setAttribute('src', "http://mysite.com/myvideo.mp4"); ifr.setAttribute('width', '1px'); ifr.setAttribute('height', '1px'); ifr.setAttribute('scrolling', 'no'); ifr.style.border="0px"; document.body.appendChild(ifr);