No YouTube play with screen off on rooted android

Talk about Mozilla browsers for small devices such as PDAs and cellphones.
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zml
Posts: 2
Joined: April 24th, 2017, 12:24 pm

No YouTube play with screen off on rooted android

Post by zml »

I hope that this is the correct place to post this bug…

Lately I found that Firefox would stop playing YouTube movies when I turn off my android screen.
Some weeks ago it did continue playing with screen off.

I have the feeling that it has something to do with the fact that my device is rooted.
I just rooted a new phone, and tested this effect and it did stop to play offline just after I installed the root zip file.
Not sure if this started due to an update in FireFox or because of a new rom.

I currently have two devices that will not play YouTube with screen off:
1) Moto x pure, running android 7.1.2 with CrDroid rom V3.0, Firefox 53.0
2) Moto G5 plus, running android 7.0 (original rom), with SR3-SuperSU-v2.79-SR3-20170114223742 , Firefox 53.0

Could someone confirm this problem?
JanH
Posts: 111
Joined: March 23rd, 2011, 1:19 pm

Re: No YouTube play with screen off on rooted android

Post by JanH »

Bug 1355407 - it could be some hard-to-track-down Firefox bug (a few weeks ago there was indeed a genuine bug in Firefox in that area), but there are some signs that Youtube might in fact be A/B-testing a new version of their mobile website that either accidentally or on purpose stops playback when it detects the tab being not in foreground.
zml
Posts: 2
Joined: April 24th, 2017, 12:24 pm

Re: No YouTube play with screen off on rooted android

Post by zml »

JanH wrote:Bug 1355407 - it could be some hard-to-track-down Firefox bug (a few weeks ago there was indeed a genuine bug in Firefox in that area), but there are some signs that Youtube might in fact be A/B-testing a new version of their mobile website that either accidentally or on purpose stops playback when it detects the tab being not in foreground.
Thanks for the update.
Is there any way to add to this bug the info that it may has some thing to do with rooting?
I will be happy to help in testing if it can help.
JanH
Posts: 111
Joined: March 23rd, 2011, 1:19 pm

Re: No YouTube play with screen off on rooted android

Post by JanH »

This starting to show up after you've rooted your phone was just a coincidence because Google gradually rolled out hits change.

I've started seeing this on my phone as well now and in fact, if I fake a a mobile user agent on Desktop I now get the same behaviour there as well.
Looking in the JS debugger from the developer tools, it's even possible to see what exactly is happening - some Youtube script is listening for "visibilitychange" events and calling "pause()" on the video player in response when a tab goes into background. Somebody with better JS skills might even be able to write an add-ons that circumvents this.
kbrosnan
Posts: 520
Joined: October 23rd, 2003, 8:32 pm

Re: No YouTube play with screen off on rooted android

Post by kbrosnan »

You can use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... -play-fix/ to work around YouTube's changes.
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