If you play films from an iPhone or iPad onto a TV, a portable monitor or a pair of XR glasses, iOS 27 may have changed how that works. Users say some players now mirror the phone’s own screen instead of sending a full-size picture, and locking the device can stop the video.
Most of the complaints come from people who plug in over USB-C with an HDMI adapter, or use glasses from Viture and Xreal. Before the update, the phone showed only the playback controls while the film went to the external screen, and the phone could be locked without interrupting anything.
A thread on Firecore’s support forum, opened on 11 September, collects the reports for Infuse, the company’s media player. One iPad owner describes a film that filled a 16:9 TV on iPadOS 26, then sat in a 4:3 box with black borders after the move to iPadOS 27. Others say the glasses simply mirror the phone, and that the video freezes with only the sound left, or the lock screen appears on the glasses, when the device is locked.
Firecore told users the behaviour “seems to be a new behavior with iOS 27” and that it was looking into it. A later poster wrote that it had gone on for nearly a month and two app updates, and iOS 27.2 has not fixed it either, according to the reports.
Other apps seem unaffected. A user on the thread says the Apple TV app and Canal+ still fill the TV, and VLC is reported to keep playing on a locked screen. That points away from a general iOS fault.
One poster traces the change to how iOS 27 handles non-interactive external display scenes, which apps now have to declare and register themselves. That is a reading by a user, not something Apple has said, but if it is right, the fix has to come from each app’s developer rather than from an iOS update.
For now, the practical workaround is a player that already supports the new setup, such as VLC. The first iOS 27.3 developer beta is out, though nothing in it has been reported to address the problem.
