iPad - play YouTube in background?

I cannot seem to be able to play YouTube videos while surfing forums like QT3. Anyone know why that may be, and what I can do to fix it?

Thanks :)

Don’t think mobile YouTube allows it. It’s been that way for a long time unfortunately. I wonder if using youtube in the browser lets you get around that?

Its a paid subscriber feature - aka, they don’t make it easy for you unless you get the paid youtube subscriber service.

Here’s a suggestion that worked a year ago or so - it may still work:

Play YouTube Videos with Dolphin or Opera Mini

  1. Open Dolphin or Opera Mini
  2. Type youtube in the address bar
  3. Navigate to the music or video you want to play
  4. DO NOT open in App–let the music play in the web browser itself
  5. If the music has ads, let them fully play while the browser is open
  6. Once music plays, go to another app or your Home Screen
  7. If the music stops, open Control Center and tap the play button on the music player to resume
  8. You can now play youtube in the background, even when your screen is sleeping or locked!

Unfortunately it’s not even available for paid subscribers. YouTube Premium will play the audio of YouTube video in the background. But you can’t do picture-in-picture with the video in a small window in the corner. The best I’ve seen is you can use split screen with YouTube in half of the screen and something else in the other half. But there’s no way to get a mini size video as you can with most other video playing applications.

Just don’t use the YouTube app, delete it. YouTube works fine in Safari, but the controls are a bit more finicky.

Go to the YouTube web page in Safari. Start the video, make it full screen. Then switch apps by pressing the button. It will go to picture-in-picture. Reopen Safari, select a different tab and go to Qt3 or wherever.

You’ll still have a small window up that you can resize and then drag it to a corner where it’s out of the way, top right is my usual choice.

Edit: I just tried it on my ancient iPad that struggles with iOS 13, but it does work.

After more experimenting, if you don’t want picture in picture, just audio, it also works using Safari. Play the video in a tab then do anything else. The sound continues to play even when you turn off the screen.

You have to delete the YouTube app though. Otherwise every time you go to the web page the app will hijack it.

Awesome!

Odd, with the exception of a few Kids related shows, I can total play Youtube videos in the background on Android. And I don’t have any paid versions of Youtube or Android.

Isn’t music the only thing you have to pay to stream?

Well, there is Youtube streaming.

But, depending on how you define background, I’ve had youtube playing on a small square in the corner of the screen, while reading the forum or other website.

Google’s iPad apps tend to suck. It took years before even Gmail starting using a decent iPad layout.

Wow, nice.i was happy enough with the background audio that worked since iOS 13, now this is perfect,.

So is there a way to multi task or pip YouTube on an iPad in IOS nowadays? If so how? And what iPads support this?

Yes, I said how to do it above. Its an iOS 12/13 thing (at least I think it was 12, it’s worked for a while now). So any iPad that supports the last couple of iOS versions. I can do it on my iPad Air 2 from 2015 that is running iOS 13.