Can our app disable/pause other app's PiP video?

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Created Sep ’15

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Our app is a game, and it has a few cutscenes played in full-screen videos. Because they are quick cutscene videos a few seconds long that we want to force the player to see, there are no video playback controls during them. But with the new Picture in Picture, it seems iOS has problems playing both our video and the PiP video - it likes to pause one while the other plays. But if our video gets paused, there is no button to restart it back up, and our game not only waits for the video to finish, the game is still doing things and is expecting the video to finish in an exact amount of time.

So is there a way we can either tell iOS to pause all PiP videos until we are done, or allow our video to play at the same time as the PiP video?

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Answer 1

NotMyName OP

Sep ’15

"our game ... is expecting the video to finish in an exact amount of time" sounds like a problem that needs to be addressed in your code. All sorts of other things, like audio route changes (having a pair of headphone plugged in when the video starts, and then unplugging them) are also likely to result in paused playback.

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Answer 2

Dreamzle OP

Oct ’15

Wow, I didn't realize it would do that outside of dedicated video/music players, that's horrible. Is there any way to tell iOS this video should never be paused/stopped by the system? Because it just doesn't make sense for 5 second videos in a game, where the player may not even realize it is playing a video. The only times the system automatically pausing a video makes sense, is if an app is a video player with video playback controls.

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