Ask HN: Chrome autplay policy has YouTube whitelisted?

2 points by phillipseamore 8y ago ↗ HN

For work I have to use a site that has an embedded YouTube video as a "cover image". It always plays automatically and bugs me a lot.

I double checked chrome://flags and autoplay policy is set to "Document user activation is required." Reloading the site with the focus in DevTools the video still plays.

Went to Chrome Canary, doublechecked chrome://flags and it also autplays there with no interaction.

I'm very disappointed if Google/Chrome is whitelisting YT videos embedded on third party sites while every other service needs to work without autoplay.

And yes I know I can use plugins, other browsers and FAX - this is about the apparent whitelisting of YT from the policy.

3 comments

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mneil 8y ago ↗

I don't know if they are or not but I do know that the autoplay, with user activation required, does not apply to sites you frequently visit and play videos on (they track behavior and potentially allow auto play). If you're a YouTube user then that policy likely allows all YouTube videos to play immediately. I recently ram into this and dig through the flags and some code to figure out why I couldn't get autoplay to work on a site I was building.

phillipseamore 8y ago ↗

Thanks for the input mneil. That's why I installed and tested with Chrome Canary - latest version, and no data in the profile. Same result and never visited YT with Canary. To make sure I should setup a clean VM and test again.

Clean Ubuntu install with Chrome also autoplays the embedded YT video with autoplay policy set to user interaction.