Safari blocks play() on video despite being called from click event

Question

I'm creating some custom video controls for an html5 element. I've bound a click event handler to a play/pause button which calls .play() on the corresponding video.

From my research, Safari will block calls to .play() unless you are in a click handler, however it is blocking my calls to .play() despite the fact that I am triggering it from within a click handler, like so:

$('.video-container .play-pause').click(function(event){
    var $video = $(event.currentTarget).parent().find('video');
    if($video[0].paused)
      $video[0].play();
    else
      $video[0].pause();
});

And the error:

Unhandled Promise Rejection: NotSupportedError (DOM Exception 9): The operation is not supported.

which is originating from $video[0].play();.

Safari Version 11.0.1 (13604.3.5)

OSX High Sierra 10.13.1 (17B48)

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It's worth noting that this error occurs whenever you call .play() on a video that Safari has failed to load.

Something else interesting is that Safari requires the web server to support the byte-range requests to correctly load video files. See note here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/36299252

I recently had an issue with serving files from the php command line process instead of a dedicated web server like Apache or nginx and couldn't work out why videos were playing on the live site, but not in my development environment.

A quick way to determine this is to load the video directly from the address bar. If it fails to load, your server likely doesn't support byte-range requests.

Answer 2

Eugh. The solution was to use an absolute path for the video source, not a relative one.

This is wrong: <video src="assets/vid.mp4"></video>

This is correct: <video src="http://example.com/assets/vid.mp4"></video>