iphone-inline-video

Make videos playable inline on Safari on iPhone (prevents automatic fullscreen)

This enables iOS 10's playsinline attribute on iOS 8 and iOS 9 (almost a polyfill). It lets you:

Play videos without forcing the fullscreen on the iPhone (demo)
Play silent videos without user interaction
Autoplay silent videos with the autoplay attribute (demo)
Use videos as WebGL/ThreeJS textures (demo)

Main features

<2KB, standalone (no frameworks required)
No setup: include it, call enableInlineVideo(video), done
No custom API for playback, you can just call video.play() on click
Supports audio
Supports autoplay on silent videos
Doesn't need canvas
Doesn't create new elements/wrappers
It works with existing players like jPlayer
Disabled automatically on iOS 10

Limitations:

Needs user interaction to play videos with sound (standard iOS limitation)
Limited to iPhone with iOS 8 and 9. iPad support needs to be enabled separately. It's disabled on Android.
The video framerate depends on requestAnimationFrame, so avoid expensive animations and similar while the video is playing. Try stats.js to visualize your page's framerate
Known issues

Install

Pick your favorite:

<script src="dist/iphone-inline-video.min.js"></script>

npm install --save iphone-inline-video

var enableInlineVideo = require('iphone-inline-video');

import enableInlineVideo from 'iphone-inline-video';

Usage

You will need:

a <video> element with the attribute playsinline (this is needed on iOS 10)
```
<video src="file.mp4" playsinline></video>
```

the native play buttons will still trigger the fullscreen, so it's best to hide them when iphone-inline-video is enabled. More info on the .IIV CSS class

.IIV::-webkit-media-controls-play-button,
.IIV::-webkit-media-controls-start-playback-button {
    opacity: 0;
    pointer-events: none;
    width: 5px;
}

the activation call

// one video
var video = document.querySelector('video');
enableInlineVideo(video);

// or if you're already using jQuery:
var video = $('video').get(0);
enableInlineVideo(video);

// or if you have multiple videos:
$('video').each(function () {
    enableInlineVideo(this);
});

Done! It will only be enabled on iPhones and iPod Touch devices.

Now you can keep using it just like you would on a desktop. Run video.play(), video.pause(), listen to events with video.addEventListener() or $(video).on(), etc...

BUT you still need user interaction to play the audio, so do something like this:

enableInlineVideo(video);
video.addEventListener('touchstart', function () {
    video.play();
});

If at some point you want to open the video in fullscreen, use the standard (but still prefixed) webkitEnterFullScreen() API, but it has some caveats.

Usage with audio-less videos

If your video file doesn't have an audio track, then you have to set a muted attribute:

<video muted playsinline src="video.mp4"></video>

Usage with autoplaying videos

The autoplay attribute is also supported, if muted is set:

<video autoplay muted playsinline src="video.mp4"></video>

Muted videos can also be played without user interaction — which means that video.play() doesn't need to be called inside an event listener:

<video muted playsinline src="video.mp4"></video>

setTimeout(function () { video.play(); }, 1000); // example

Usage on iPad

The iPad already supports inline videos so IIV is not enabled there.

The only reason to enabled IIV on iPad:

you want muted videos to autoplay, or
you want to play videos without user interaction

To enabled IIV on the iPad:

enableInlineVideo(video, {
    iPad: true
});

Notes about iOS 10

New features in iOS 10:

videos play inline:

<video playsinline src="video.mp4"></video>

muted videos play inline without user interaction:

<video muted playsinline src="video.mp4"></video>

setTimeout(function () { video.play(); }, 1000); // example

muted videos autoplay inline:

<video autoplay muted playsinline src="video.mp4"></video>

Essentially everything that this module does, so iphone-inline-video will be automatically disabled on iOS 10. Make sure you use the playsinline attribute.