setCurrentTime fails silently for Vimeo iframe embeds in iOS Safari

[ehmorris]

Expected Behavior

For setCurrentTime to seek the Vimeo player and display the frame at the passed timestamp. Or for setCurrentTime to return an error in the catch method.

For comparison, the YouTube iframe player will display the frame at the passed timestamp in iOS Safari when seekTo is called via the iframe API.

Actual Behavior

The player does not seek and does not return an error in iOS Safari.

Steps to Reproduce

CodePen debug view | CodePen editor view

Correct behavior on desktop

1. Open the linked debug view on a desktop browser.
2. Scroll up/down.
3. Note the video scrubbing in the background, also note the console logging setCurrentTime invocation, and success or failure.

Incorrect behavior on mobile

1. Open the linked debug view in iOS Safari.
2. Scroll up/down.
3. Note the video not responding, also note the console logging setCurrentTime invocation but never logging success or failure.

Compare to YouTube

CodePen debug view | CodePen editor view

Correct behavior on mobile

1. Open the linked debug view in iOS Safari.
2. Scroll up/down.
3. Note the video scrubbing successfully.

Additional Note

I think this may be resolved by enabling the new playsinline feature within the iframe embed.

[ehmorris]

@bdougherty do you think I can expect this behavior to be added to the vimeo player on mobile?

[bdougherty]

@ehmorris can you try adding a listener for the error event? There is a bug right now that prevents the method-specific error response messages from going out if you aren't listening for error events. I hope to have a fix for that soon.

We don't have any plans at the moment to add support for inline playback on iOS.

[ksolberg]

Are there any workarounds for this?

[enoziak]

Did this ever get worked out? I'm running into the same issue.

[ehmorris]

Afaik there are no workarounds for my use-case.

Also worth noting that since I posted this, YouTube/iOS behavior has changed such that the mobile player autoplays the video from the scrubbed timestamp.

[luwes]

#210 will add a playsinline parameter

[luwes]

@ehmorris would you mind having a look if this issue persists? We recently had several fixes go out, including the throwing errors correctly in catch.

[ehmorris]

@luwes thanks for coming back to this. I went through my reproduction steps and noticed that before I initiate playback, I get the error Error: The viewer must initiate playback first., and after I initiate playback it seeks to the time and continues to play.

[luwes]

(^^ scusi, was in the wrong window)

I think currently that is the best we can do. setCurrentTime() internally calls play() which will fail because it's done without user interaction. Only for muted videos this can be done I believe.

Would you like to see different behaviour in this case?

[ehmorris]

@luwes sorry, to clarify I think my issue is resolved.

It would be awesome if I could set the time on a muted, uninitialized video though.

[luwes]

Awesome! I will reference #20 here to keep that in mind when adding a start time option.
Thanks for your feedback!