Error When Using iOS User Agent in Browser Device Emulation

[Dananji]

Description

When using mobile device emulators in Firefox and Chrome with Apple device user agents, the streaming doesn't work in the Avalon player. But in the actual devices (iPhone 12 Pro, Safari and Chrome) streaming work as expected. Tested item: NY World's Fair Home Movies 1964-1965 on MCO.

Error in the browser emulator: When this happens the following error is logged to the browser console;

Uncaught (in promise) DOMException: The play method is not allowed by the user agent or the platform in the current context, possibly because the user denied permission. 

Done Looks Like

• [ ] Further testing done to ensure whether this is a bug or a browser related issue
• [ ] If this is a bug create a ticket to work on a fix

[elynema]

Works fine on iPhone 7, Google Chrome and Safari. Works fine on 4th gen iPad, Google Chrome and Safari.

[joncameron]

This appears to be exclusive to specific user agent strings (for Apple devices) in the emulation modes for these browsers.

I tested with the latest Firefox and Chrome on my Mac and could reproduce this. Not sure why Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 11; SAMSUNG SM-G973U) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) SamsungBrowser/14.2 Chrome/87.0.4280.141 Mobile Safari/537.36 works but Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 does not.

[joncameron]

Might be a patch to our existing MediaElement version or an upgrade to MediaElement within Avalon.

[joncameron]

Revisit after an update to current MediaElement.