Updates

Core Player

• Updated the player to check for browser-level autoplay restrictions.
• Updated the player to autoplay with sound if possible, autoplay muted if possible when there are no ads, or autoplay muted ads if autoplayadsmuted: true is set. The player will fall back to click-to-play after exhausting all autoplay options.
• Added the ability to start playback from a non-zero position. You can register seek as a function of the ready or playlistItem events, so that the player starts playing from a specific point.
• Added support for DASH streams on desktop Safari. NOTE: DASH streams are not supported on iOS Safari, nor with Airplay on desktop devices.
• Added user agent detection for UC browser, where previously it was reported as Chrome. UC browser can be detected using the getEnvironment() API.
• Implemented licenseResponseFilter for DASH streams and Fairplay. These methods allow customers to modify or access responses from license requests. This is needed for license wrapping implementations.
• Added a new API method, getCurrentTime(), which exposes the current time value of content. For on-demand streams, currentTime will be the same as the position. For live or DVR streams, the currentTime will not be modified based on duration or seekable range.
• Improved the user experience on mobile devices by allowing the viewer to pause playback of videos that autostart muted without unmuting first.
• Expanded media preloading capabilities to preload subsequent media before the current media ends. As is the case with preloading media that will play after an ad break, this behavior will only occur when the preload configuration option is set to metadata (default) or auto. Players with preload set to none won’t load content in the background.

Recommendations

• Made the recommendations shelf the default display mode for related playlists. For more information, please see the configuration reference and the release notes for v8.1.10.
• Improved accessibility for the recommendations shelf so that viewers can interact with it using a keyboard or screen reader. Viewers can use the left and right keys to paginate through the shelf and the escape key to close the shelf when not in fullscreen mode.

Ads

Google IMA

• Passed the results of the autoplay restrictions check to the ad plugin using the two new fields in the IMA ad request, setAdWillAutoPlay and setAdWillPlayMuted. This is necessary for AdX/AdSesnse.

FreeWheel

• Added the adLoading parameter to the adError event.
• Updated the requestTimeout configuration option to work.
• Added the streamType: live configuration option for denoting live streams with FreeWheel ads.
• Improved the user experience by making the player click-to-play when the browser suppresses autostart.

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue causing the pause event to trigger twice when serving a mid-roll ad.
• Fixed an issue preventing the controls from fading away if you mouse out of the player over the controls.
• Fixed a bug with VTT captions reducing the horizontal space for captions, which drastically increased the number of lines of text per caption.
• Fixed an issue where the player did not successfully cast playlists if the JSON file was greater than 56.2kb in size due to a memory restriction on chromecast devices