Why in the holy love of interweb are my videos not autoplaying?
Was there some seismic jolt in the Force?
Is the world coming to an end?
Was the Digital God Maximus Backup-zamus laughing at me?
Did the Cubs win the World Series?
Well, in fairness to the Cubs….they did win a couple of years ago. Off to another good start to another 108 year World Series drought.
ANYWAYS….back to the topic. You might have noticed when you embed your Youtube or Vimeo videos and have them autoplay, not too long ago, they would autoplay just fine. Well I went on to one of my sites with graphic golf course where each hole is a hyperlink that opens up a YouTube video flyover of that particular hole! Pretty snazzy, huh? Well, the problem is, they were not autoplaying anymore.
WTH*&!#
Even when I looked at the url….check how it started out….
https://youtu.be/YmJl6PgXYas?controls=0&rel=0&With this code acting as the link, it was autoplaying just fine about a couple of months ago. By this time, I thought “Man, its Friday afternoon…why am I being punished like this?” After feeling sorry for myself, I quickly turned to who’s to blame.
GOOGLE!
Google is always messing with my well-being, right when I feel at home in the technological landscape of nerd-dom.
Ahhhh….a solution
Turns out that there is a massive conspiracy against autoplaying videos by browsers, platforms, and other entities that control all of our lives. What these entities do not like, is the sound. Solution: what we will need to do to our video, is turn on AutoPlay and Mute the video.
How do I turn on AutoPlay and Mute my video?
This is actually particularly easy to do with a little coding on the end of your video url. When adding any parameters to your url, you must START your additions with a question mark ‘?’ like my link below:
https://youtu.be/YmJl6PgXYas?controls=0&rel=0&This separates the actual url and adds your parameters to the end, and directs the browser what to do with your video. There are tons of parameters….look at a few from YouTube – YouTube parameters.
What I did to the above url, is strip out the controls and stop the relative videos from showing after the video ends playing. Now, what we need to to is turn on autoplay and mute the video. MUTING THE VIDEO is the critical part here to get your autoplay to run. After the initial question mark with the first parameter, you can add other parameters starting with an ampersand (‘&’). I am going to add autoplay=1 and mute=1 to my url to complete the autoplay functionality. It now looks like this:
https://youtu.be/YmJl6PgXYas?controls=0&rel=0&autoplay=1&mute=1When you get to this part of the page….this video below has already finished. Refresh now, and see what we have done to this video below:
Now my video autoplays with no sound, which works for this instance because there’s no sound anyways. And on the other hand, there is nothing worse than trying to secretly watching a Michael Jordan highlight video while your at work, and the sound starts blaring out of your desktop! That just screams – “Hey everyone- I’m not working!”. No one wants that to happen!
In conclusion…
Having your video autoplay brings a sort of freedom and aesthetic look to what you are trying to achieve with your videos on websites. Whether they are supposed to autoplay as a background on your homepage, or an attempt to automatically engage our audiences immediately. This function can always change depending on the entities in control of our lives, but for now….you are in control. Go smartly nerds….and always be two steps ahead of the technology White Walkers.
Peace. ✌️