My friend Jigar, Android developer extraordinaire, has recently been showing me various features of the Google Nexus 7 (2013 version). This time, however, he showed me something...odd to say the least. His Nexus 7, it seemed, was having trouble displaying videos from the web.
More specifically, the Nexus 7 was having trouble displaying TED Talks and videos on The Verge. As shown in the embedded video, the Nexus 7 displayed a blank green screen instead of the actual content when the device was in landscape mode. Videos displayed just fine in portrait mode. One extra quirk was that the video would briefly return to normal in landscape mode when the device was about to transition to portrait mode.
After some additional testing, we determined that it wasn't all web videos that were problematic (Youtube, for example, worked fine) but just videos hosted by Vimeo. This Nexus 7 runs Android 4.3, so we asked another friend to try the same videos on his Google Nexus 4 that also runs Android 4.3. The videos worked perfectly on the Nexus 4, regardless of the source or the orientation of the device. The Nexus 7, it seems, has some sort of problem that isn't specific to Android 4.3.
Folks, this is a strange bug. I'm surprised that I haven't heard of this one before.
Thanks to my friend Jigar for bringing this to my attention. You can find his posts on Twitter as @jigarhb.