12 ms·

Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few second

by k3oni 9y ago

Auto-playing crap bugs the hell out of me. Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds. Started using "Disable HTML5 Autoplay"[1] extension in Chrome and works great. I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default until i hit Play or have a setting for that. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-autoplay/efdhoaajjjgckpbkoglidkeendpkolai?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

otalp 9y ago
Safari is going to stop Autoplay by default in High Sierra
koonsolo 9y ago
That's what you get when you don't clearly separate text content from multimedia. With HTML5 it's all mixed together. And now you end up with text content full of annoying interactions, and crippled down multimedia functionality.
andrewfong 9y ago
I find the extension rather unreliable actually. There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well (forcing me to temporarily disabled the extension and reload page).
- gaius_baltar 9y ago
  > There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well Pretty sure this is by design, as Twitter wants that content to auto-play. Forcing a poor experience for people who use blockers and making us white-list their domain seems a suitable strategy. It's something like Facebook chat in mobile mode. Facebook wants its cattle to install that spyware-ridden messenger, so first they disable chat/messenger in the mobile site (not sure they already killed it, last time I checked there was only a warning; need to create a new bunch of test accounts to check again). As people will fight the change by using desktop-mode in mobile (one of the best features of Firefox for Android), they have a incentive to make the desktop site intentionally unusable in touch devices.
  - ghostly_s 9y ago
    It has indeed been entirely disabled in the mobile site, and is nearly unusable if you request the desktop site (which of course can only be done through the browser settings, they don't provide a link for it). So I stopped using it!
    - oddlyaromatic 9y ago
      mbasic.facebook.com lets me get messages and send them.
- lorenzhs 9y ago
  For Twitter, you can disable video autoplay in the account settings and whitelist twitter.com in the extension. But there are other sites where this doesn't work.
dguaraglia 9y ago
The latest craziness is "news" websites that have an autoplay video + an autoplay ad, and their actual content is just another video, because apparently reading 10 lines of text is harder than sitting through a two minute slideshow with the same ten lines of text and some pretty pictures. It's getting ridiculous.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  I don't think it's a simple problem though. I want my videos on Youtube, Twitch and other similar sites to auto play, without having to click it manually every single time. We get into a whitelist/blacklist situation. The best way is to stick to one way, and allow users to fully unblock a site. Right now, it auto plays but you can fully blacklist a whole domain. I could also see it as everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically does it if you click play on a few videos.
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    It could be a permission (like sharing location) or maybe a permission that can only be requested after the user clicks play on a few videos. (That would prevent me having to select "no" to every trash website that requests permissions, like Chrome allowed with pushed content permissions in the past.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    > everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically does it if you click play on a few videos That's basically what they're doing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...
    - fish_fan 9y ago
      Is there anyway to wipe the whitelist?
  - fish_fan 9y ago
    If only you could somehow enable users to make decisions for themselves we could solve this....
ryan-c 9y ago
I use that extension too, but it has severe issues with newsweek, which seems to detect playback failed and retry many times per second forever.
- sly010 9y ago
  I would argue in that case that newsweek is the one who has severe issues.
GrumpyNl 9y ago
Why o why is the sound always on max when it starts with autoplay?
- rhizome 9y ago
  Because it's a setting in the videoplayer initialization.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
lima 9y ago
Yay, let's install another extension with full access to all your stuff!
- k3oni 9y ago
  Don't get me wrong, i wish i wouldn't have to install one single extension and that this would be a built-in feature or that the website having a video to show me won't auto-play the damn thing from the get go, but this is the world we live in.
  - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
    Autoplay blocking is built into Firefox via an about:config option. Much better than this half-baked solution that still permits annoying behavior.
cookiecaper 9y ago
The problem is that HTML 5 video is really useful for replacing animated image formats. The technology in modern video codecs is way superior than gifs, etc., and the real impact of that is greatly reduced space/bandwidth consumption, like orders of magnitude better. Just as we start to leave gif in the dust, Facebook pulls the dick move of auto-enabling sound on all auto-played HTML 5 content. I think that Google's solution of refusing to autoplay videos with soundtracks is a good compromise which will allow us to continue to enjoy the benefits of modern video codecs while simultaneously preventing built-in video support from gaining the bad rap that got attached to Flash. --- EDIT: Reply to rhizome, since I'm not allowed to post for a while for having an illegal opinion on Kubernetes. I'm not suggesting that the technology would be eliminated in its entirety, but disabling autoplay of all HTML 5 video neuters its use as a replacement for animated gifs.
- rhizome 9y ago
  Nobody's talking about eliminating HTML5 video as a technology.
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
>Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds Perhaps even worse than that, some sites (including TIME, at least previously) unpause the video when you scroll.
- chrisallenlane 9y ago
  I've noticed this on many other news sites recently as well. I hope this trend dies soon. This is an immediate "close tab" for me when it happens.
thinbeige 9y ago
> I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default Sound yes but why video?
- mistersquid 9y ago
  Video often presents a significant visual distraction when one tries to focus on the text nearby. It can bad enough that I'll find the auto-playing video element in my browser's DOM inspector and delete it.
  - dzhiurgis 9y ago
    Do you also block gif's and JS/CSS animations?
    - mistersquid 9y ago
      I do remove animated GIFs that distract my focus when reading text. I haven't yet felt the need to block CSS animations. Up to now, UX animations aren't so distracting they impede my reading. I think this may be because CSS is generally not used in ways that constantly distract while reading text. A CSS fade or transition on scroll doesn't bother me as much as animated video/GIFs. EDIT: Clarity.
- fish_fan 9y ago
  I basically never open a web page to look at a video. For me, it's a straight up waste of bandwidth. I don't mind clicking on eg youtube videos.
dzhiurgis 9y ago
Problem with disabling autoplay completely is that it sort of breaks gifv and embedded content inside reddit and twitter. You sometimes need to press Play or space bar to get them going. Thankfully in latest Safari you can check "Audio needs user action" which seems to solve the problem, although now some videos manage to start autoplay without my action.
hkjayakumar 9y ago
The extension is no longer being actively worked on [1]. It works on some websites for now, but will probably be circumvented in the future. [1] https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay/blob/master/NEWS.md https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay/blob/maste...

by k3oni 9y ago

otalp 9y ago

Safari is going to stop Autoplay by default in High Sierra

koonsolo 9y ago

That's what you get when you don't clearly separate text content from multimedia. With HTML5 it's all mixed together. And now you end up with text content full of annoying interactions, and crippled down multimedia functionality.

andrewfong 9y ago

I find the extension rather unreliable actually. There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well (forcing me to temporarily disabled the extension and reload page).

gaius_baltar 9y ago
> There are a lot of sites (e.g. Twitter embeds) where turning off autoplay also seems to break manually clicking play as well Pretty sure this is by design, as Twitter wants that content to auto-play. Forcing a poor experience for people who use blockers and making us white-list their domain seems a suitable strategy. It's something like Facebook chat in mobile mode. Facebook wants its cattle to install that spyware-ridden messenger, so first they disable chat/messenger in the mobile site (not sure they already killed it, last time I checked there was only a warning; need to create a new bunch of test accounts to check again). As people will fight the change by using desktop-mode in mobile (one of the best features of Firefox for Android), they have a incentive to make the desktop site intentionally unusable in touch devices.
- ghostly_s 9y ago
  It has indeed been entirely disabled in the mobile site, and is nearly unusable if you request the desktop site (which of course can only be done through the browser settings, they don't provide a link for it). So I stopped using it!
  - oddlyaromatic 9y ago
    mbasic.facebook.com lets me get messages and send them.
lorenzhs 9y ago
For Twitter, you can disable video autoplay in the account settings and whitelist twitter.com in the extension. But there are other sites where this doesn't work.

dguaraglia 9y ago

The latest craziness is "news" websites that have an autoplay video + an autoplay ad, and their actual content is just another video, because apparently reading 10 lines of text is harder than sitting through a two minute slideshow with the same ten lines of text and some pretty pictures. It's getting ridiculous.

ehsankia 9y ago
I don't think it's a simple problem though. I want my videos on Youtube, Twitch and other similar sites to auto play, without having to click it manually every single time. We get into a whitelist/blacklist situation. The best way is to stick to one way, and allow users to fully unblock a site. Right now, it auto plays but you can fully blacklist a whole domain. I could also see it as everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically does it if you click play on a few videos.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  It could be a permission (like sharing location) or maybe a permission that can only be requested after the user clicks play on a few videos. (That would prevent me having to select "no" to every trash website that requests permissions, like Chrome allowed with pushed content permissions in the past.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  > everything is blocked and you whitelist Youtube. Maybe even automatically does it if you click play on a few videos That's basically what they're doing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJLg14Ogf-ekAFNymAJoU/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_278v_plodvgtXSgnEJ0yjZJ...
  - fish_fan 9y ago
    Is there anyway to wipe the whitelist?
- fish_fan 9y ago
  If only you could somehow enable users to make decisions for themselves we could solve this....

ryan-c 9y ago

I use that extension too, but it has severe issues with newsweek, which seems to detect playback failed and retry many times per second forever.

sly010 9y ago
I would argue in that case that newsweek is the one who has severe issues.

GrumpyNl 9y ago

Why o why is the sound always on max when it starts with autoplay?

rhizome 9y ago
Because it's a setting in the videoplayer initialization.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

lima 9y ago

Yay, let's install another extension with full access to all your stuff!

k3oni 9y ago
Don't get me wrong, i wish i wouldn't have to install one single extension and that this would be a built-in feature or that the website having a video to show me won't auto-play the damn thing from the get go, but this is the world we live in.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  Autoplay blocking is built into Firefox via an about:config option. Much better than this half-baked solution that still permits annoying behavior.

cookiecaper 9y ago

The problem is that HTML 5 video is really useful for replacing animated image formats. The technology in modern video codecs is way superior than gifs, etc., and the real impact of that is greatly reduced space/bandwidth consumption, like orders of magnitude better. Just as we start to leave gif in the dust, Facebook pulls the dick move of auto-enabling sound on all auto-played HTML 5 content. I think that Google's solution of refusing to autoplay videos with soundtracks is a good compromise which will allow us to continue to enjoy the benefits of modern video codecs while simultaneously preventing built-in video support from gaining the bad rap that got attached to Flash. --- EDIT: Reply to rhizome, since I'm not allowed to post for a while for having an illegal opinion on Kubernetes. I'm not suggesting that the technology would be eliminated in its entirety, but disabling autoplay of all HTML 5 video neuters its use as a replacement for animated gifs.

rhizome 9y ago
Nobody's talking about eliminating HTML5 video as a technology.

YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago

>Some news sites do it as well even when you go and Pause the player, it will go on and play ahead after a few seconds Perhaps even worse than that, some sites (including TIME, at least previously) unpause the video when you scroll.

chrisallenlane 9y ago
I've noticed this on many other news sites recently as well. I hope this trend dies soon. This is an immediate "close tab" for me when it happens.

thinbeige 9y ago

> I wish every browser would stop sound and video by default Sound yes but why video?

mistersquid 9y ago
Video often presents a significant visual distraction when one tries to focus on the text nearby. It can bad enough that I'll find the auto-playing video element in my browser's DOM inspector and delete it.
- dzhiurgis 9y ago
  Do you also block gif's and JS/CSS animations?
  - mistersquid 9y ago
    I do remove animated GIFs that distract my focus when reading text. I haven't yet felt the need to block CSS animations. Up to now, UX animations aren't so distracting they impede my reading. I think this may be because CSS is generally not used in ways that constantly distract while reading text. A CSS fade or transition on scroll doesn't bother me as much as animated video/GIFs. EDIT: Clarity.
fish_fan 9y ago
I basically never open a web page to look at a video. For me, it's a straight up waste of bandwidth. I don't mind clicking on eg youtube videos.

dzhiurgis 9y ago

Problem with disabling autoplay completely is that it sort of breaks gifv and embedded content inside reddit and twitter. You sometimes need to press Play or space bar to get them going. Thankfully in latest Safari you can check "Audio needs user action" which seems to solve the problem, although now some videos manage to start autoplay without my action.

hkjayakumar 9y ago

The extension is no longer being actively worked on [1]. It works on some websites for now, but will probably be circumvented in the future. [1] https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay/blob/master/NEWS.md https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay/blob/maste...