Thank you very much for this great app. I purchased the iOS version to support your work.
Now, I’m facing a couple of issues when using videos.
Sometimes, when I browse through my cards, a previous video will continue to play in the background. I don’t see any trace of it, but the sound continues to play. I can’t reproduce it well unfortunately, but it happens when I go on the deck, then on search, then on the little eye to preview the cards. And when I browse through the cards there, it happens sometimes. Before it happened quite often, but now I muted my videos before importing them, so now I don’t know exactly how often. Also, I’ve been avoiding going into that preview mode because of the next two bugs.
Sometimes, I have the same anomaly as in this thread: videos-dont-start-on-anki-iphone/35978 (I’m not allowed to post the link)
I don’t know how it’s related exactly to the first one, but I believe it is, since the problems don’t appear when I avoid the preview mode. The only way to get around this one is to restart the phone. Closing Anki is not enough.
The most annoying is the last one, and I think it’s directly correlated to the first one. Sometimes, after going into preview mode, I can’t play videos in the iOS Photos app. I can scroll on the bottom, and it will show the little preview-pictures on the bottom, but that’s it. The main image remains frozen. There again, the only workaround to this is to restart the phone.
Some infos on my setup:
a) iPhone 15 Pro Max with latest iOS (17.3.1).
b) I use cards that contain only short videos (less than 20 seconds).
c) All decks and cards created on the phone.
d) No sync. I only did a manual export once (but the issue happened before that already).
e) The videos autoplay, and I hid the media control buttons.
The first issue may be something under AnkiMobile’s control - I’ve made a note to look into it. Point three sounds like it may actually be an iOS bug, and I’ve actually experienced the photos app failing to play videos even when AnkiMobile hadn’t been used. Hopefully they will address it in a future update.
After many many attempts, I think I managed to find a way to reproduce the bug! In the meantime, I’ve had quite a lot of needs for rebooting my phone, and it happened every time I had used the preview mode (the eye icon above the listing of cards, behind the search button). So I suspected there was a link, and I think I found a way of reproducing it reliably.
Steps to reproduce:
Create a new deck
Add a card with a video from photos, ideally with sound (so that you can hear if it continues playing in the background). In my case, the video is on the front, the rest is empty. The video I chose is larger than the ones I usually use (around 2:50 long), but I think the video length is actually not very relevant.
Go to the overview of cards in the deck (Search button)
Click on the eye icon (second from left)
The preview should show the card with the video that plays
Go back to the overview of cards in the deck (not sure if this step is optional or mandatory to reproduce the issue)
[At this stage, I can already report a surprising behaviour: when I then go back to the card overview, the video will continue playing in the background. Maybe that’s by design? To me, it’s surprising and not really expected.]
Swipe up to go to the home screen
[At this stage, the playback will pause after about a second. Previewer will be shown as the active media player in iOS. The time shown in the previewer is the time when the video stopped.]
Wait for quite some minutes (five minutes is not enough, one hour is enough; I suppose it’s around 15 minutes, maybe enough time for the system to kill some background process)
[If it’s too early, when I go back to the deck or back to the preview mode, the video playback will be replaced by the new video.]
Go back to Anki, and click on the eye again
The video will be black, not playing.
Go to the photos app, videos won’t play.
Swipe down from the top of the screen, and you’ll see previewer still showing as active media player, but this time the time shown will be 0:00.