Open Radar

 
12-Jul-2011 02:31 AM Thomas Tempelmann:
Summary:
Quite often, when viewing a video in the Videos app on my iPad1 (OS 4.3.3), quitting the player and then returning to it, I end up with a entirely black screen, with the app remaining unresponsive.

Steps to Reproduce:
Difficult to reproduce. Happened to me 3 times so far.
Every time I was in the middle of watching a movie, then pressing the Home button to open other apps, e.g. Mail, then going back to the Videos app (usually by using the lower multitask row) - then the screen redraws first to the last movie frame, then turns into the black view, with the status bar sometimes still visible, though. Quit and relaunch, even reboot, won't fix this.

Regression:

It appears that the video player gets into a bad state. One fix I found myself is to remove that last played movie from the device - when I then relaunch the player, it "resets" itself and works again.

Another, easier, fix is described here: http://lnoens.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/blank-screen-on-videos-for-ipad/

I have archived a complete (unencrypted) backup of the iPad in this bad state, and if you (or an engineer working on this app) can tell me which files you need, i.e. which files do save the current state of the video player, I could send you those files along with the video file so that you can analyse this bug, hopefully.

Notes:

Googling for "ipad video black screen" will show you that this problem is around for quite a while now, so this is nothing only I experience.

12-Jul-2011 05:08 PM Patrick Collins :
Engineering has requested the following information in order to further investigate this issue:

Are you also experiencing this issue with iOS 5.0b3 (9A5259f)?

12-Jul-2011 05:34 PM Thomas Tempelmann:
Sorry, as it's apparently not possible to revert to iOS4 after installing iOS5, I have not dared to install iOS5 yet, and so I can't test this.