Why mid-roll ads can not play on ios15.4 when the content video change from mute to unmute

[whmiaohk01]

Hi
I have a problem about the mid-roll ads that do not play on iphone that the ios version is blow 17
1.Open the content video with mute and autoplay, the pre-roll ads will auto play in mute.
2.After pre-roll ad, the content video will auto play and click the mute button to unmute the video.
3.Then the mid-roll ads can not play, from the console.log it seems end immediately after the ad start. There also no error.
The problem will not happen if I comment the function SdkImpl.prototype.onPlayerVolumeChanged

Could you please help me to find the reason and if there are some ways could fix this problem
Thanks

[Kiro705]

Hello @whmiaohk01 ,

I am unsure why the volume settings would be affecting mid-roll playback. I do not have an iOS device on versions lower than 17 to reproduce this issue with.

I would recommend looking at this Custom Playback APIs for IMA HTML5 and Mobile Safari article which may be playing apart in this bug.

If you are able to identify the cause of the issue, I can look into implementing a fix in the next plugin release.

Thank you,
Jackson
IMA SDK team

[whmiaohk01]

Hello @Kiro705

Thanks for answering. I have debugged and find that when the video try to play the mid-roll ad, it will throw a NotAllowedError error show as the following capture and catch by the ima web sdk.

Since I set disableCustomPlaybackForIOS10Plus = true, there will be two video element on the html, one for content and one for ad.I guess the reason may be that we never interact with the ad video like click, we just unmute the content video and use javascript to unmute the ad video.Then when try to play the mid-roll ad, it will try to play an unmute video without user interact with it, So it is denied by the Safari autoplay policy.

I think maybe we can check weather the ad video can play in unmute mode before setVolume from 0 to 1 or catch the error and replay the ad in mute mode.But I am not sure weather it is possible to implement, do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks
whmiao

[Kiro705]

Hello @whmiaohk01 ,

I saw your thread in the IMA SDK forum and I think this is an issue specific to the VideoJS-IMA plugin, and not an issue with the IMA SDK.

I was able to reproduce the issue where the midroll is skipped if the content is unmuted on iOS 15. I will plan to look into a fix for this issue in the plugin.

Thank you,
Jackson
IMA SDK team

[whmiaohk01]

Hello @Kiro705

My I know is there any update about this situation?

Thank you,
whmiao