Vimeo onebox videos automatically play on page load for desktop browsers

Not sure if this is a bug or a feature. Starting with it as a :bug:.

Continuing the discussion from Twitter (and Dailymotion) video onebox autoplays without user interaction, which included a post about how Vimeo oneboxes automatically play on desktop browsers:

Is there a way to turn this off? Would an adaptation of @david’s pull request dealing with datamotion videos work?
https://github.com/discourse/onebox/pull/348

The problem is especially confusing/annoying if the user follows a link to a post deep in a topic and a video at the top of the topic starts playing automatically.

3 Likes

Can you post an example link here that exhibits the problem?

Oh, of course! Sorry. Please see:

2 Likes

I do see in both Firefox and Chrome. Agree that it is annoying. Did you notice that the video re-starts if you re-load the page?

I do see that the iframe link rendered in the no-script zone has “autoplay=1”. I’m wondering if this is partly due to how the embed link is being created by Vimeo?

2 Likes

I think this is a #bug not a #feature, :bug: @eviltrout perhaps you can have a look.

That’s odd – when I try and embed the same video on the latest version of Discourse it doesn’t autoplay. I saw that your forum is using a relatively recently install, so I wonder if Vimeo was temporarily returning autoplay markup from opengraph?

Can you try posting a different vimeo video on your forum? I suspect it won’t autoplay anymore. You should be able to edit the post with the autoplaying video and it will update the onebox.

3 Likes

Well, shoot – yes – that seems to be the problem. If I rebake the post (Rebuild HTML from the wrench menu of the post) the video no longer autoplays.

Thank you for following up.

4 Likes