OP, does your phone have any problem playing any other video content or is is just porn? As far as content providers, do you get yours from only one place, or do you “shop around,” so to speak?
I’m just wondering by what mechanism this would work. If it’s working on, let’s make up a fake number, OS 23, and OS 24 comes out, how would Apple kill the video on OS 23 retroactively? If it was working on OS 23 before, there would need to be some sort of patch downloaded to it to cripple it, wouldn’t there? I mean, I could see if the content providers changed a codec or something that needed to be updated and wasn’t available in OS 23, but is in OS 24, but otherwise, it doesn’t make much sense to me.
You’re correct, this conspiracy theory makes no sense. If Apple were going to force download a patch to kill video, why wouldn’t they just download a patch to do the update they supposedly want you to do?
YouTube plays just fine. Videos from other sites do, too. Just porn! (?) And just via Safari. What setting could have been changed, if any, that would cause that?
Did you just turn it on and off, or did you reset it by pressing the home button and the top (sleep/wake) button until it resets? If you only did the former, try the latter.
@ pulykamell
You make sense - I hadn’t thought of a mechanism Apple would use to do that. Maybe Apple has a built in code that tweaks settings in Safari so videos don’t play after a certain date? (At the risk of sounding like some whack job conspiracy theorist.)
I do know that I’ve had this situation several times in the last couple years on both iPhone and iPad. I’m not a first adopter when it comes to updating, I prefer that the bugs be worked out by others for the first month or 6 weeks. In each case videos stopped playing and in each case as soon as I updated they resumed. Maybe coincidence.
I’m guessing the update just reset something that had gone buggy on your phone and all was good again. Did you try resetting the phone before updating the OS? I’ve left OS updates lag for ages and never experienced an issue like described. In fact, I just restored an iPad that had an OS on it from two years back and had no issues with any video sites or anything on Safari or anything, but I admit I did not try that particular iPad on porn to my recollection.
It’s also possible that the sites in question updated their players to require a new codec or whatever. Apple’s only involvement would be that they stop pushing codec updates to their deprecated OS versions.
Sure, I mentioned that (more or less) in the last sentence of my first post. That makes a lot more sense to me than somehow cutting the video playing functionality of an older OS, but if it’s happening on a range of unrelated websites (and I’m not sure if it is or isn’t) there might be something else futzed up on the iPhone.
Another thing to try for shits and giggles, and I have no idea if this will work, (in addition to the reset via home button and top button press) is to erase your Safari history and cookies, and see if that clears something up (Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data). Also, if you have been good with backups, you can try restoring phone from a backup from when you know you didn’t have an issue accessing your websites.
Also, you can try another browser like Firefox or Chrome and see what happens.
Install Google Chrome or Firefox, my dude. More than likely that will solve your problem.
Need answer fast?
Nah, I’ll be fine.