Separate audio and video into different html tags

Hi,

Thanks for your super awesome work!

I have a very special and disturbing request to submit today.

The situation is that I would like to have a streaming content on a webpage (like a person talking), as well as let users navigate other content and sometimes play it, could be audio or video. However, on Safari on iOS, it won’t work: the browser allows only 1 video with audio playing at a time. So if the user clicks on play on a secondary content on their iPad, the streaming stops and only the secondary video plays. It is a known issue on Safari on iOS (https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162366). It however works perfectly on any desktop browser…

A workaround seems to be to split the video into a <video> and an <audio> tags: then the video is muted and can play as a “background” video, while the audio is played separately, and multiple audios are allowed to play together anyway. This example provided in the comments of the webkit bug works like that: http://curious-electric.com/_temp/video-bug/workaround.html

It also seems to work like this with webrtc video-conferencing solutions (jitsi, …).

So, would it be possible to implement something like an audio/video split with OvenPlayer and OvenMediaEngine to allow a streaming and another video together?

[SangwonOh]

@GregOriol Interesting. However, with the current OvenPlayer implementation, separating video and audio tags seems to be a very difficult task. This is because from the initial design, it was designed to play audio and video in a single video tag. For now, I think we have to think about whether there are other alternative methods.

[GregOriol]

That’s why I was saying “kind of does the thing for a WebRTC stream”: it seems to work well because the syncing is done by the stream and it’s the same stream object being used. Not sure that would work for HLS/Dash for example.