Video Playback in Android Starts Oscillating Between Play/Pause

Hi, I have videos from a web link (mp4) being shown in an app. In the Web preview and IOS Live App everything works fine but in Android (Live App and APK), when pressing pause the videos often get stuck into an oscillation between play/pause with no easy way to stop it.

I have tried adding a separate button instead of using the video overlay UI but setting the video object’s state to paused using blocks has the same result. This is a particular issue as there are different videos on different pages and there are blocks which pause all videos on the current page before moving to the next page in case the user has left one playing. The problem is this often results in moving to the next page and the video from the last page playing in the background in stuttered fashion as it rapidly swaps between play/pause.

Q1) Is this a known issue? I don’t have another Android device to try it on at the moment but it’s a fairly standard Galaxy Tab
Q2) Is there any other way to control a video object’s play state which might be more robust in Android?

Many thanks,

Hello @swimboss282hw7j :wave:
I understand the issue there.
Unfortunately, stopping a video on another screen that it started is impossible.
The best solution to this would be to pause/stop the video before you navigate to the next screen.

Hi, thanks

That’s not quite the issue. I’m automatically setting the video to “stop” when the user presses a button to navigate away from the page.

The issue is that on Android, on the Galaxy Tab I am using (Both for Live App and Compiled APK) every now and again pressing the pause button on a video widget (or calling stop from blocks) puts the video into a loop switching between play/pause, here’s a video of it happening:

Oscillating video example

This sometimes happens every few clicks, sometime you can do 20 clicks and the play/pause function works fine. You can usually get it out of this oscillating state by pressing the rewind button.

The biggest issue is that if this oscillating loop happens when exiting the page the video does not get stopped and is just left juddering along in the background while you try to use the app.

Hello @swimboss282hw7j :wave:
Thank you for sharing the video!
Can you share which steps have caused this?
What blocks do you have?

Hi,

no blocks required, the problem occurs just with a video widget pointing to an mp4 hosted on an AWS server and then using the play/pause UI built into the video widget. All the videos we have do it.

Separately I have also used a “Set [video name]'s Play [true/false]” block to link to an onscreen button and to fire when the user leave the page. The blocks call also occasionally trigger the oscillation.

We’ve finished this app but can’t publish with this bug as the app is intended for mindfulness/relaxation/meditation and having a video get stuck on in the background would be too distracting for the user.

Is there a workaround?

Thanks!