Vimeo hosted videos do not work as expected with Able Player on iOS. The videos play with no sound, and the iOS default video player does not open.

We tested using the Able Player Vimeo demos:

Vimeo player (captions hosted on Vimeo)

Vimeo player (captions hosted via Local VTT Files)

We tested on two devices running different versions of iOS:

iOS 26 on 3rd Generation iPhone SE

iOS 18 on iPhone 12 Pro

Expectation

Videos will play with sound.

After tapping Play, the default iOS video player will open (this was the behavior in version 4.5.0), displaying the videos in full screen with the default iOS video player controls.

Actual behavior

All four demo Vimeo hosted videos play with no sound in Safari (default iOS browser) and Chrome on iOS. They do have sound when played in Firefox on iOS. As expected, there are no volume controls available, other than the device's volume controls (side buttons). Changing the device volume does not affect the lack of sound in the videos.

The Vimeo videos on the Able Player demo site play as expected, with sound on Android devices and on macOS and Windows desktop devices.

The sound issues appear related to Vimeo hosted videos. Other videos (HTML5, YouTube) on the Able Player demo site play with sound on iOS.

The four Vimeo hosted demo videos remain in Able Player on the webpage while playing. The iOS default video player does not open. Since the videos do not open in the iOS video player, they are not full screen. The videos on the webpage are small. The button to expand the videos opens them in a dialog that cannot be closed (see GitHub issue #493). The dialog does not substantially increase the size of the video.

The iOS player not opening may be related to the Able Player version. Other videos on the Able Player demo site do not open the iOS player, but videos using an older version (v4.5.0) of Able Player do: IU Web Framework video chunk YouTube video and HTML5 video.