Chrome Autoplay Policy - Chrome 76

Question

I'm building a kiosk media which runs on Chrome that plays video with audio. I know that chrome by default only allows autoplay for videos with muted props.

And i know that i WAS able to override this by enabling a flag in chrome via chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

I have just updated to Chrome 76 and this flag seems to be gone and the autoplaying of video doesn't seem to work anymore!

Any idea how do i overcome this?

[Chrome 76.0.3809.100 (Official Build) (64-bit)] Mac OS Mojave

Solution 1

I just spoke to some developers from Google about this issue recently. I submitted a bug. They have been very helpful.

Even though autoplay policy chrome flag was removed in https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/1593800, you can still run Chrome with a specific autoplay policy from the command line.

Autoplay policy that does not require any user gesture.

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required

They say this command will stay, so that's good but even better Chrome allows you to always enable autoplay by explicitly allowing a website to make sound "Site Settings > Sound"

Good luck.

Solution 2

You can use command line code to execute chrome in kiosk mode with no-user-gesture-required:

google-chrome-stable --kiosk http://google.com/ --new-window --start-maximized --incognito  --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required --disable-features=PreloadMediaEngagementData,AutoplayIgnoreWebAudio,MediaEngagementBypassAutoplayPolicies &

Comments

[Craig MacKenzie]

Perfect! This resolved my issue. Thanks for sharing.

[webp]

So what does this no-user-gesture-required option do? It will always allow auto-play? When this #autoplay-policy was still available, the setting value to disable auto-play was "Document user activation is required". What is its equivalent command line option? (In my testing, using --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required doesn't stop video from auto-playing)

[code]

@webp the "no-user-gesture-required" means that the user does not need to interact with the document for video or audio sources to start playing automatically.

[webp]

@code_secret so what value should I use to prevent video from automatically played?

[code]

@webp I'm not really understanding what you mean. This post was stating an issue with autoplaying to work in kiosk mode. If you don't want your videos to autoplay... did you try adding the tag autostart="false" ?

[dpren]

You sure? I couldn't replicate with document.getElementById("test").click() What about jQuery is different?

[mikey]

same here.. couldn't do it with plain js

[Luca_Scorpion]

Tried in Chrome version 87.0.4280.141, doesn't work with plain js or jQuery.

[Ork Sophanin]

You're should try Raw javascript.

[Luca_Scorpion]

As mentioned in my comment, I did try that. Simply using document.body.click() doesn't work either. Events like this triggered from JS aren't considered "trusted" and thus don't count as user interaction with the page.

[Ork Sophanin]

try this code $('body').trigger('click'); at the top of your play() code.