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A comment on Show HN: 360° and VR Video Streaming in HTML5 Tutorial, Build a Netflix For VR.

Re:Show HN: 360° and VR Video Streaming in HTML5 Tutorial, B... by untog on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @11:33AM (#10931768)
Does this work on an iPhone? I was playing around with in-browser 360 degree video a while back and was infuriated to find that absolutely everything I required - WebGL, a Three.JS library, <video> tags, were present - but iPhone Safari will only ever play videos fullscreen through tap to play, so it's impossible to play a video through WebGL.

I really, really wish Apple would drop this restriction. Aside from anything else, the original intention (bandwidth savings) is totally ruined by the fact that everyone is encoding videos as (much larger) animated GIFs to get around the restriction. How about letting videos autoplay, but silently, and have "tap for sound"? Either that or disable autoplaying of GIFs, because the current situation doesn't really make sense.

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Re:Show HN: 360° and VR Video Streaming in HTML5 Tutorial, B... by slederer on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @11:47AM (#10931888)
No, iPhone is not supported yet. but we are working on it and will have the support added shortly. We just have to use HLS instead of MPEG-DASH for the streaming, as Safari on iOS does not implement the HTML5 MSE.
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Re:Show HN: 360° and VR Video Streaming in HTML5 Tutorial, B... by untog on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @11:54AM (#10931936)
How are you getting around the tap-to-play restriction on video tags? Are you decoding the video some other way inside WebGL, or...?
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Re:Show HN: 360° and VR Video Streaming in HTML5 Tutorial, B... by joshkpeterson on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @12:28PM (#10932208)
Android Chrome as well requires user input (usually a tap) to play videos. So a less drastic change would for iOS to do the same, not just let videos autoplay.

Also, if you want to use the web audio API to control the volume of videos like this, there's a known issue that prevents you from doing that on Android Chrome if you source the audio from a <video>.

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Re:Show HN: 360° and VR Video Streaming in HTML5 Tutorial, B... by saspiesas on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @01:45PM (#10932860)
It's also worth noting that this is a direction I see mobile browsers heading in, not a restriction that may disappear at one point.
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