I think that is a limitation of Android. I don’t know of any video player that is able to keep playing the sound when the screen is locked. The best I’ve been able to do was once I found an app that would basically draw a black screen over the video player so you still get sound, but couldn’t touch anything on the screen. I forgot what it was called and don’t have it anymore but it worked at the time.
MXPlayer can do background play. MXPlayer can lock just the screen (so that you can touch the screen without anything happening, e.g. accidentally pressing onscreen buttons) and it can play audio while not in the foreground and it can play while the phone itself is “locked”
MX Player can play audio in the background, which the Plex app can do as well. The request is for audio from a video file to continue playing with the video part off, which even MX Player cannot do.
On Android, the new YouTube app can do this (they lock it behind the Red subscription) and the Twitch app can do it (has both pop-out floating windows and separate audio streams that can play with the screen off).
So, if playing video with the screen locked is restricted by Android, then I’d ask for the same effect to be achieved by allowing audio-only streams of video content.
I’m ‘watching’ most of the youtube videos audio only during traveling and turn on the screen only if I heard something interesting.
I was surprised that how abandoned this feature is.
Looking the youtube app give the impression of that it switches to audio only when the phone is locked and switch back to video when unlocked.
@anon18523487 I could live with short glitch when switch to audio/video. Sometimes the youtube app interrupts too.
I used to be able to work around this by playing, then locking via the power button, then pressing play from the notification shown on my lock screen. This recently stopped working though.
It sucks that every other player I use (MX, VLC, & youtube) has managed to find a way to do this to some extent, but Plex is the one hosting the content I’d actually like to listen to and hasn’t made progress on this after so many years.
Plex should allow background playback of self hosted content.
What is background playback?
When I play a video and turn my phone screen the video continues to play uninterrupted.
Plex absolutely needs this feature. I personally like to listen to my documentaries and sitcoms as background noise while I am at work. And would prefer to turn my screen off.
