VideoPress, Video block: Auto-play and loop share options not working

[sbassah]

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to https://wordpress.com/ > My Sites > Pages > Add Page.
2. Click the Add button to add a video to the text editor
3. Upload / Select a video and click Insert to insert the video into the text editor
4. Click the "Share" button at the top right
5. Check the checkboxes for Autoplay and Loop
6. Publish Page.

What I expected

I expected the video to autoplay and loop when the page loads.

What happened instead

The video doesn't autoplay or loop when the page loads. Also when I refreshed the page in the editor and clicked the "Share" button at the top right again, I noticed the checkboxes have been unchecked. Like the changes didn't save. However, when I manually added autoplay=true and loop=true to the video shortcode, the video is able to autoplay and loop as expected.

Browser / OS version

Chrome / Windows 10

Screenshot / Video

Context / Source

[stale]

This issue has been marked as stale and will be closed in seven days. This happened because:

• It has been inactive in the past 9 months.
• It isn't a project or a milestone, and hasn’t been labeled `[Pri] Blocker`, `[Pri] High`, `[Status] Keep Open`, or `OSS Citizen`.

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[formosattic]

Issue still there, autoplay set in the Video block doesn't work.
User report (4453768-zd-woothemes), but also reproduced on self-hosted site so moving this to Jetpack.

[jeherve]

autoplay set in the Video block doesn't work.

Unfortunately it won't always work. As we discovered when we first introduced the feature to the block settings in #13134, some browsers can prevent a video from being autoplayed. You can read more about this in this comment, where we discovered that browsers would not respect autoplay in some scenarios (like the video not being muted), while others would never respect it:
#13134 (comment)

[masperber]

35760045-hc a customer asked why autoplay wasn't working. It also didn't work for me in 5 different browsers using my test site. (I tested Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and Brave.)

If this feature doesn't work for close to 99% of browsers, shouldn't it be removed?

[jeherve]

If this feature doesn't work for close to 99% of browsers, shouldn't it be removed?

That's a valid question, and maybe something worth considering.

@Automattic/greenhouse What's your take on this?

[jgcaruso]

autoplay has a catch where if the video has audio then you also need to mark the video as muted. Doing that should work 100% of the time, regardless of the browser. This is a browser restriction for all web video, and not something specific to VideoPress. The only other catch would be if you are on a mobile device you may also need plays inline to be enabled.

It would probably be helpful if we documented this somewhere on the block settings though OR if we just automatically muted a video when autoplay is enabled. I'll add a card to our team board to take a look at this.

[jgcaruso]

We've deployed a change that forces the video to be muted when autoplay is enabled.

[masperber]

@jgcaruso Thanks for this change. I encountered one customer where they had the Autoplay feature enabled, and the video did not autoplay, muted or unmuted. However, I was not able to reproduce this behavior on my test sites.

I noticed that when the Autoplay setting is enabled, the Muted setting does not visually enable. I suggest as an improvement that it would be beneficial to force the Muted setting to visually enable, so this way the user understands that Autoplay will cause the video to be muted.

As well, I suggest replacing the text below the "Autoplay" setting.

Currently it says this:

Autoplay may cause usability issues for some users.

Perhaps that text could be replaced or augmented with something along these lines:

Autoplay may only be enabled when Muted is enabled.

[github-actions]

Support References

This comment is automatically generated. Please do not edit it.

• 4453768-zen

[jgcaruso]

I noticed that when the Autoplay setting is enabled, the Muted setting does not visually enable.

There was this change back in August that actually allows autoplay to play with audio if the browser allows it. The viewing user can give the browser permission to do this for certain sites. So we don't want to force muted on autoplay videos since it would break that functionality.

https://github.com/Automattic/greenhouse/issues/1274#issuecomment-1222735389

There is a card though to give the editor more control over if that feature should be supported, but no eta on when that will be addressed https://github.com/Automattic/videopress/issues/1066