Does this happen with all video file formats, or only with WebM?

@Aklapper What / where can I find other video formats on Wikimedia to test? I thought you only supported WebM?

I suspect you know better than me whether Safari now has any support for WebM on iOS, it seems like it still may not, in which case this is unfixable.

WebM is supported on iOS 15 +

Can you please link to the video you tried?

Sure, the video is on this page (as screenhotted). The video is on Commons here. The screenshots were on iOS 15.1.

Do you have any information about WebM support on iOS? The best i could find was that there is limited support for the audio part of this standard.

I can reproduce too in Safari but not Chrome

After reading https://www.google.com/amp/s/9to5mac.com/2021/08/10/apple-adding-webm-audio-codec-support-to-safari-with-ios-15/amp/, I looked in settings and found "WebM Web Audio" disabled but turning it on and force closing Safari didn't help.

Yes, so I think the position at iOS 15.1 is the same as it has been, ie, that WebM video is not supported. So this should presumably be closed as "won't fix".

However, I think at a minimum Wikimedia should warn users that the videos don’t work on iOS Safari, and preferably link to a page explaining why, and how best to access the content. I will raise a ticket for that.

I raised a feature request to give iOS users a warning about this; I've also tested in FF and Chrome, which presumably use WebKit, so also don't play WebM media. It can be accessed after download and played on VLC and other media players tho, but this does not include subtitles, which are supllied via the video player used by WM, no doubt because WebM does not support subtitle files natively.

In T298442#7592941, @RhinosF1 wrote:

WebM is supported on iOS 15 +

This is not true. Safari only supports WebM on Safari Desktop 15+, and only with some hacks because Apple messed up the feature detection when they introduced this in June last year.

FYI. we just merged a patch to workaround the Safari bug and to support native VP9 playback on macOS Safari on Macs from 2018 and later. Still doesn't do a thing for iOS however.

Out of the scope of the web team's work.

Hi @Jdlrobson Please read this task alongside T298515 - the webteam can't fix iOS Safari problem, given the constraints you have on acceptable codecs and standards. However, you can warn users that video and audio does not work and why. Thus this bug report should be closed, as 'won't fix', in favour of warning users as described in T298515.

Hi @JimKillock my team is not familiar with the code relating to this component so I'm not informed enough to make that decision. The maintainers are listed under TimedMediaHandler https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers