Does this only happen on YT? Who knows what they're doing with UA checking, but if you can reproduce with this solo URL it's interesting:

http://storage.googleapis.com/dalecurtis/buck2.mp4

As far as I could test, it happens with any web site using HTML5 video. I can reproduce it with your test URL.

Using the patched webview shell app (with modified UA):

1. adb shell pm clear org.chromium.webview_shell

2. adb shell am start -n org.chromium.webview_shell/.WebViewBrowserActivity -d http://storage.googleapis.com/dalecurtis/buck2.mp4 => video OK

3. exit app with BACK button

4. adb shell am start -n org.chromium.webview_shell/.WebViewBrowserActivity -d http://storage.googleapis.com/dalecurtis/buck2.mp4 => video OK

5. force process exit: adb shell am force-stop org.chromium.webview_shell

6. adb shell am start -n org.chromium.webview_shell/.WebViewBrowserActivity -d http://storage.googleapis.com/dalecurtis/buck2.mp4 => black video

Thanks, +liberato, -strobe then.

Thanks for filing the issue.

1. Please provide the app package name or test apk of webview shell app to perform step-1
2. Please attach the Video for us to reproduce. This would help us in further triaging.

Thanks!

1. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/android_webview/tools/system_webview_shell/apk/
2. http://storage.googleapis.com/dalecurtis/buck2.mp4

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding the requester to the cc list.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

Oh is this in the emulator? 

No, on a real device.

What device is this? I can't think of any reason why the user agent would make a difference here. 

It's an Intel Baytrail platform with Celeron N2930 CPU.

Given that the video works again after clearing the app data, I'd say that the primary suspect is whatever data the webview engine is storing in the application private directory.

What device specifically is this? Does it ship with the Play Store and other Google apps?

If this only reproduces on android-x86 (which is an unsupported fork of android) then it's unlikely we can do much about this; we don't have suitable devices and this isn't something we support. If there's another device that it reproduces on, then we can probably take a look.

It is not a consumer device. It's a baytrail-based platform running android-x86. It doesn't have play store or google apps.

I've updated the webview to Chrome/70 and I couldn't reproduce the problem. I've tested several versions and the results were:
- 65: ok
- 68: not ok
- 70: ok

As a side note, I find it unfortunate that you guys don't want to support android-x86 (and its derivatives), as it is the only general purpose Android fork that runs on Intel platform.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding the requester to the cc list.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

If it's fine in 70 and later then there's probably nothing for us to do here. Thanks for testing.

We'd consider contributions to fix issues with any platform, supported or not, through our normal process (code review, etc); the android-x86 community are welcome to contribute to Chromium. We just have finite development resources to investigate and fix problems, and unfortunately general purpose x86 devices are the hardest platform to support since they differ from each other significantly, and we aren't likely to have access to any particular device to test/reproduce issues. Our priority is the devices supported by AOSP (for the benefit of Android platform and application developers) and consumer devices (for the benefit of the largest segment of users). We're a small team and we already have to support a very large number of devices :)