dbawel Posted July 18, 2016 Share Posted July 18, 2016 Hello Babylonians, I just spent the past couple of weeks working on video sync between multiple users and devices, and couldn't get sync working reliably from the server to all devices. And more specifically, I was unknowingly wasting valuable time troubleshooting why I wasn't able to sync video on Android, unless play and pause was initiated from the Android device. Yet I was able to consistantly sync video 100% on every other device, OS, and browser for multiple users based upon other conditions. I searched the forum and also spent considerable time on Google and other search engines researching this, yet found very little reference to this as well as no answers to the problem. Thus, I assumed it was a problem in my server code since this is not a very simple task by any means. However, this was not the case, as it turns out to be a bug on Android using various browsers - and specifically Chrome on Android - but not limited to. The issue is that when I sync video between multiple users, I'm calling the video DOM and aquiring current time and sending this to all other users on every other device, OS, etc. And for the most part this was working on all devices except Android. So I'm writing this post so that the community should know that currently - and for quite some time now - querrying the current time for any HTML video object such as a videoTexture returns a time value = 0.0 on Android (using Chrome and other browsers). I didn't keep track of all of my testing, as I thought my server code was the issue. However, what I discovered is that for several years now, Chrome and other browsers on Android return the current time of any HTML video at the time value of 0 when this.video.currentTime() is called. So out of frustration and past a deadline, I somehow decided to test FireFox on Android (as I was debugging my server code for the 100th time), and FF returned the correct currentTime() when I querried the DOM video property. So I'm quite frustrated, but happy to report that I'm now able to sync video between any device and any number of users providing I am using Fire Fox on my Android devices. So if anyone on the forum has issues with video on Android, first uninstall Chrome, as I found this has never worked on Android - EVER - according to posts I found from more than 2 years ago. And I often find far more bugs in Chrome on Android than any other OS (hey, isn't it the same manufacturer for both?) And Google doesn't seem to view this as a priority since this has been reported since early Droid versions. I'll file a report as well, but I'm not holding my breath. Also, I'm now able to control the play and pause functions - including autoplay and pause on Android where I was never able to get this working in the past. Again, simply avoid Chrome on Android, and I'll try and find time to test other browsers as this is not only a Chrome issue. All I can tell you right now is that Fire Fox HTML video DOM querries and HTML video functions work fine on Android. And to imagine I had thought Google was the most responsive company for developer support. Obviously I was wrong. Cheers, DB Wingnut and GameMonetize 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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