@Transcy
Thank you very much for your suggestion and time to think about it, but unfortunately I cannot get it to work.
For reference, here is the page on my store:
https://store.alohadays-kitchen.com/products/basque-cheesecake
Looking at this further, I still don’t have a solution but here are some things I’ve observed:
- In Chrome on a desktop and also while simulating a tablet, the video plays as desired. Visitors simply click on the video and it plays immediately.
Clicks to watch the video: 1 click
- Simulating a phone (using Chrome on a desktop): The product media is put into a slider.
Clicking on the video will open a modal that contains the video.
Then clicking the video begins to play it.
Clicks to watch the video: 2 clicks
- On an actual iPhone: As above, the product media is put into a slider.
Clicking on the video opens the modal. However, it seems that on an iPhone you must next tap the video to “activate” it. And then you can press the Play button.
Clicks to watch the video: 3 clicks
I think can accept 2 clicks. Because the Dawn theme puts the thumbnail into a slider that can be swiped by the finger, you could cause confusion by playing the video when the user actually intended the swipe the slider. So popping it up in a modal is good UX (I guess).
But 3 clicks to watch a video is kind of unacceptable.
I’m now trying to figure out how to avoid the activation step on a smartphone, so the video plays automatically when the modal opens.
According to this page, it seems like it should be possible to autoplay a video on an iPhone:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/delivering_video_content_for_safari/
And the Dawn theme renders all the required parameters on the video tag:
<video playsinline=“playsinline” controls=“controls” autoplay=“autoplay” loop=“loop” preload=“none” muted=“muted” …
This is turning out to be more complicated than I expected!