No video control progress bar on streaming video in Android app

[DJones722]

Hi all. I hope someone can assist with a strange issue. I recently started seeing an issue with streaming video (mostly mp4 format) from the dropbox app on Android. When streaming video, after pressing play to start the video, I can't access the progress bar of the video so I can skip ahead or go back in the video, or see how much time is left in the video. Tapping my screen does not cause the bar to appear. I also noticed that tapping my screen does not cause the pause button to appear. I've tried dragging my finger up from the bottom of the screen to see if I could get the progress bar to appear, but it only causes the comment field to appear. It seems as if the video controls are unaccessible once video starts streaming. Please note, if I set the video to offline, I don't have this problem. I assume I don't have the problem when viewing offline video because I'm using an available media player on my local device to play the video, not relying on dropbox to stream it at that point. This seems like a recent issue. I've streamed plenty of video from my Dropbox app in the past on this same phone without issues before. Has anyone seen this? Just so everyone knows, I've force closed the app multiple times, cleared cache, restarted my phone, and have tried multiple videos, long and short, located in different folders. I'm on app version 158.2.2. I'm running android 9 (not rooted) on a OnePlus 5.

[Daphne · Accepted solution]

Hey there @DJones722,

Thanks for the extensive info you've provided here and great job on the troubleshooting so far!

Could you to try re-installing the Dropbox app on your mobile to see if that will do the trick, since you're seeing this behaviour consistently with multiple videos throughout your account.

Let me know how it goes and we'll go from there - thanks!

[DJones722]

Hi Daphne. Thanks for getting back to me. It looks like the problem might be with my phone. I uninstalled and reinstalled on my phone and got the same results. For clarification, I tried the same thing on a different android phone, different android OS version, with different customizations because it's from a different manufacturer, but running the same version of Dropbox, and I didn't experience the same problem. Only thing left me to do I wipe my phone and start from the beginning, but I'm not planning on that. I'll leave this be and maybe a future update to Dropbox and or my phone will correct whatever is the problem here.

[Daphne]

Thanks for trying that @DJones722!

To have a look into this further, I've reached out to your email address associated with your Community profile. If you're interested to continue looking into this, please just check your inbox when you have the time and we can go from there.

Thanks!

[MccJoe]

I'm actually sort of having the opposite problem. The video control progress bar won't go away. My son is deaf so we upload special video with captions at the bottom. We stopped using OneDrive because they made thier progress bar solid instead of clear and we were looking for a new cloud storage service.

[Walter]

Hi there @MccJoe; I'm sorry for the late response.

Are you still having issues with this? 

In case you do, I'd appreciate a screenshot so we can have a visual too.

Thanks! 

[MccJoe]

Still having the same issue.  I'm at work so once I get home I'll take the screen shot.  We have found sort of a work around.  While he's watching the video if we open up the comments option it pushes the bar down low enough that most subtexts can be seen.  Though it craps the video into a smaller portion of the screen so he has to set right up in front of the TV.