Enable Background Audio Playback For Videos On iOS 6 With BgVideo
When we open a YouTube video for a song, we are often interested in just listening to the song rather than watching the video. This task is pretty easy if you are using a computer, but not necessarily a walk in the park if you are on a mobile device. Until iOS 5, it was possible to keep any video’s sound streaming in the background, but for some reason, iOS 6 took that useful feature away. Now whenever you exit Safari (or whichever browser you are using on your iDevice) while watching a video, the playback stops and can’t be resumed using the lock screen controls or the buttons located in the App Switcher tray. Thankfully, a tweak available in the Cydia store has fixed this issue in a simple manner. BgVideo takes things back to the way they were in iOS 5. The tweak adds the video sound control back to the App Switcher tray and lock screen.
While BgVideo itself does not require any configuration, you still have to go through some extra steps to install it on your jailbroken iDevice. Apart from the fact that no one thought of developing such a useful tweak earlier, it is also a bit strange that when it has finally arrived in the Cydia store, none of the default repos have it available. Users have to manually enter the developer’s personal repo to their Cydia sources in order to get their hands on BgVideo. Here is the repo’s address:
https://cydia.myrepospace.com/bestguyhaha
After you add this repo to Cydia’s sources, wait for your sources to refresh. When the black screen goes away, look in the Changes section for the tweak, or simply perform a search for BgVideo.
As already mentioned, the tweak does not require any configuration, but it still adds a menu of its own to the stock Settings app. The menu doesn’t have any feature-related options; it just shows the version info of BgVideo and lets you donate to the developer. The donation option makes sense because BgVideo offers its functionality for absolutely free.
To see if BgVideo is working properly, play any video on YouTube, Metacafe, or any other website that plays videos using the stock iOS player, and then quit your web browser. The playback stops, but can be resumed using the lock screen controls or the App Switcher tray.
BgVideo is a great tweak and works with both Safari and Chrome. We are sure that there are some websites out there for which the background playback won’t work, but all videos we tried during our test run worked just fine with the tweak. Download BgVideo if you have been missing the background audio streaming ever since updating to iOS 6.
[via iDownloadBlog]
It kinda makes sense why Apple would remove this feature from iOS6. They want the only source of legitimate music on a non jail broken iPhone to be coming from DRM enabled music apps such as Music app, Spotify etc. They realized that they are loosing their monopoly because lot of people want to use Youtube as their music player and discovery engine.