I just upgraded my iPhone to iOS 8 and realized that the BDC Mobile stops playing videos. Is anyone running into the same problem? Please help! Thanks!

Hi Jongleur,

I apologize for the trouble. Unfortunately, iOS 8 is so new, we haven't actually begun testing it yet. I'm glad you brought the issue to our attention, because we will as a result start looking at iOS 8 with a greater sense of urgency.

iOS 8 has been reported to be quite buggy, which is not a surprise with a brand new release. Even the 8.01 update, which was released today to address some of the first wave of bugs, has created new issues of its own. It's possible (albeit doubtful) that playback of certain videos could be problematic, and if so, Apple will no doubt address the issue in an upcoming update. But assuming it's not a bug, we will have to update either our code, or, in a worst case scenario, reprocess all of our videos with a newer compression scheme.

Since I haven't upgraded to iOS 8 yet myself, I'd like to start with a series of tests, and I'm hoping you (or anyone else with iOS 8) will help. Together we may actually be able to pinpoint the problem, and with any luck, it will be a quick and easy fix on my end. Of course, it could also be something major, in which case it could take a lot longer to address, but this troubleshooting process will help us either way.

First and foremost, I'd like you to click on the following link and let me know if you see a working video or not:

https://www.ballroomdancers.com/test.m4v

This alone may give us all the info we need. But if not, we'll move on to phase 2 and I'll post a new link for you to try.

Thanks in advance for your assistance, and I hope to resolve the issue for you as soon as possible!

Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
BallroomDancers.com

Jonathan,

it works! Thank you for being so resposive! Please let me know if I can help any other way!

By the way, actually the playback of the BDC videos has no problem in its full site with iOS 8. But it would be very hard to give up the mobile version.

I have another update for you:

After only a day, a Google search for "iOS 8 won't play video" has several more pages of relevant results than yesterday. The consensus of these results is that there does indeed seem to be a bug that prevents the display of HTML5 embedded video in iOS 8, but only when you've saved the mobile website to your home screen as a mobile web app. It seems (and please verify this if you would) that if you open mobile Safari and navigate to our mobile site at https://mobile.ballroomdancers.com/, the video will play there.

It's not ideal, but it's a decent workaround, and will do the job until Apple fixes the issue.

Regards,
Jonathan

Yes, it seems to be the case for now: we will have to use the mobile version through Safari. Not ideal but still better than searching the BDC full site on an iPhone screen. I will keep checking on the bug issue too. Please let me know if you have new solutions.

Thank you very much for the effort!