Hi, is there a way now to autoplay videos on mobile? Especially in a background stack? @willwood You have some great video stacks, perhaps you know more about the current developments?
Have a look at Sections Pro from BWD. Afaik the videos have to be set to mute for autoplay though.
As of April 2021, the easiest explanation I can offer is that providing the video has a ‘playsinline’ attribute and starts muted, it should autoplay in most web browsers. Although it is still feasible for a website user to go into their browser settings and completely disable all forms of autoplaying. So autoplay is certainly NOT something to rely on for an important presentation of content.
The VideoStack I released last month on the community addons website can do everything needed to support autoplaying video. Give it a try and donate if it works for you.
For a long time it was said that autoplay was disabled to conserve bandwidth. But consider that audio only adds a very small part to the total file size. A muted video still has to download both the audio and video components simultaneously. So that viewpoint doesn’t really hold much credit nowadays.
A more plausible explanation is perhaps that big tech companies (like Google and Apple) would prefer websites not to gain too many app, game or advertising characterises, which autoplaying video (with sound) would risk bringing. They instead want to push developers more towards building native apps to sell on app stores and perhaps force websites to use their own advertising platforms. More money to be made that way.
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I don’t mind autoplaying video but I really hate it when I go to a site and it starts audio automatically (making me and all around me jump), so I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with the big tech companies.
Same here. I love background videos without sound for some sites I create.
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