Automatic Video Playback under SiteKiosk Android

In a few days 2015 will come to an end, therefore PROVISIO wants to wish you all the best for 2016 and we want to keep the last post for 2015 short. In the past we had a few support requests asking about automated video playback on an Android device. If you are not using the Digital Signage feature of SiteKiosk Android, with which you can create a campaign to automatically playback and even loop a video by using the Digital Signage editor of SiteRemote, there are some limitations you need to be aware of.

Automated video playback is limited in Android. This is not special to SiteKiosk Android but a general behaviour of the operating system. That feature is meant to save bandwidth and battery power. It has been added to the Android operating system on purpose and affects browsers running on Android. This means it also affects the browser part of SiteKiosk Android.

There are code examples floating around the web that can work around this behaviour to a certain degree. One of these examples can be found on github, the  code to autoplay a video is available here (https://gist.github.com/BCdmlap/5339273).

If you not only want to use autoplay but also would like to loop the video, you can find an example here (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11225927/html5-video-will-not-loop-on-android-devices).

At the time of this writing the above examples have been tested with SiteKiosk Android 2.4 on different Android 4.x versions and was working.