Video pauses briefly while exiting fullscreen iOS

[jrhager84]

What are you trying to do?

I'm using react-native-video v6.14.0 with expo 53 and everything is going great, but there is a simple issue that I don't understand. When going into fullscreen, the video continues to play. This is ideal. However - When exiting fullscreen, the video pauses briefly (I imagine a rerender). Is there any way to enable seemless playback while entering/exiting fullscreen with react-native-video?

What have you tried?

When entering fullscreen, the video continues to play (ideal/expected). When exiting fullscreen, the video pauses briefly (suspected to be caused by a rerender).

Relevant code

No response

Version

v6

Platforms

iOS

[TWG-AI]

A brief pause when exiting fullscreen on iOS is sometimes expected — the player briefly suspends during the animated view transition. To help determine if this is beyond normal behaviour:

1. Are you using the built-in controls={true} fullscreen button or calling presentFullscreenPlayer() / dismissFullscreenPlayer() programmatically?
2. Does it happen with local files or only remote URLs (i.e. is it buffering or rendering)?
3. Which exact v6.x version are you on?
4. Does the video resume immediately after the pause, or does it stall?

A screen recording showing the pause timing would help a lot.

[moskalakamil]

This is expected behavior on iOS.

When exiting fullscreen, the native iOS player may pause playback as part of the fullscreen dismissal transition. In react-native-video, we already handle this case by checking whether the video was playing before fullscreen starts dismissing, and then resuming playback once the dismissal transition finishes.

This was added in #4472 and has been available since v6.12.0

Because the pause happens during the native iOS fullscreen transition, a very short interruption may still be visible when leaving fullscreen. We can investigate whether this can be optimized to make the pause shorter or less noticeable, but it is probably not possible to make this transition completely seamless on iOS.