Google Chrome Beta For Android Now Lets You Play YouTube In the Background (techtimes.com)

The recently released version of Chrome on Android -- v54 (albeit in beta) -- finally brings a feature that users have been requesting for years: it lets them play YouTube songs in the background. Much like some of you, there are many out there who prefer listening to songs on YouTube instead of getting a subscription or otherwise downloading a music-streaming service. From a TechTimes report: With version 54, Google introduced a handful of updates to Chrome Beta. The new version introduces a handful of features that include background video and playback and a redesigned new tab page, among others. Among the features that are packed in the said beta version, background video playback is perhaps the most significant. In older iterations of Chrome, including version 53, videos will get paused once a new app is opened or after switching to the home screen. In version 54 beta, the videos will still get paused automatically but Android users are provided with an option to resume them via a media notification. Audio from the video will continuously be heard while using other apps.

Comments

Hmmm

[wbr1]

I wonder if it will stay after beta. You get this in the youtube app if you play for google play music (which I do for other reasons). It is a nice feature to have, but I do not see them giving it away for free when it is an advertised premium feature in another app.

Re:Not fixing the underlying cause

[omnichad]

Because playing a video in a background where 90% of the downloaded data is wasted is not a problem...

thanks for nothing Google

[frovingslosh]

I have a bad habit on the PC of leaving tabs open and coming back later to finish reading something or start following links. Often I end up with multiple browser windows with multiple tabs in each. It becomes a real problem when some damn auto play ad or news story starts up and I can't even find which window it is in to shut it down. So now Google is setting up Android so that so that the browser will play unseen videos in the background. Nobody wants that!

And if you're thinking "I could run music on YouTube in the background", get a clue. You can already play background music with apps like Pandora or Slacker or several Internet radio apps, and that will waste much less bandwidth, data and battery power.

Re:thanks for nothing Google

[drinkypoo]

if you're thinking "I could run music on YouTube in the background", get a clue. You can already play background music with apps like Pandora or Slacker or several Internet radio apps, and that will waste much less bandwidth, data and battery power.

It is actually possible to get audio only from youtube with a chrome extension. It would be nice if this were made a central feature of the platform, though. There's lots of shows which are essentially podcasts.

On the other hand, I use Firefox, and I can already "watch" a Youtube video in a background tab. I get a little icon on the tab which lets me know that it's emitting audio, so that I can rapidly close it if that's what I need to do. I usually just use a downloader to watch Youtube videos, because my ISP is crap and I don't want to deal with buffering issues, so I time-shift. There are some of those which will grab just the audio as well.

Re:Not fixing the underlying cause

[dmitrygr]

Spoken like a person who's never designed battery-powered systems. People do not understand the distinction between backgrounded and killed. You might (perhaps maybe) but the general user does not. Add to this the general incompetence of your average "app" writer, and you're left with hundreds of background threads keeping your CPU wake and making your battery life shit. What android does (and iOS too) is the only sane thing to do when on batteries: do your best to make as few things run as possible. Have special APIs for background tasks that actually need to happen in background (downloading, updates, audio).

Re:Not fixing the underlying cause

[Solandri]

The reason we need this hack is because Android essentially stops any application that is not on the foreground (if memory pressure becomes an issue, the application is killed instead)

That's how iOS used to work until recently (when real multitasking was added). Any time you started a new app, the previous one's state was saved and it was killed. "Switching" to the previous app meant saving the state of the current app and killing it, then restoring the saved state of the previous app. This gave the illusion of multitasking, but there was no multitasking going on.

Android has always supported multitasking (it's based on the Linux kernel), and apps not in the foreground continue to run until memory is exhausted, at which point the oldest/least used has its state saved and is killed to free up memory. Android utilities (like backup utilities), Google Play app updates, music playing apps, etc. run just fine in the background (formerly, iOS needed a kludge to get music to play in the "background"). Video not playing in the background is a choice made by the video app designer - a pretty good choice too in most cases. No point decoding and rendering the video if it can't be viewed. And it's a reasonable assumption that if someone watching a video switches to a different app, like text messaging or to take a phone call, that they want the video paused until they can switch back to it.