Remove the autoplay option for videos posted

[missakins]

Title
Remove the autoplay option for videos posted

Short, concise description of the idea
I would like to be able to remove the autoplay option from a video, even if the original poster included it.

Full description of the ideaIn reading my friends page several times people have placed videos in communities that used the autoplay option with the

Comments

[exdream_]

I haven't encountered this myself, but if autoplay can be enabled, I'd prefer to remove the option too.

[sleepfighter]

Someone who actually knows these things can correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that was determined on the other end of things, ie, Youtube, et al?

[missakins]

I know YouTube uses something like "autoplay=1" in the URL. It would be trivial for LJ to strip this out when they read the code that people type/paste in.

[trixieleitz]

Any particular situation where this would be an advantage over using video placeholders? This is a genuine question, as it was the first solution I thought of to fix the OP's harassment problem, and I can't think of a reason why it would be undesirable.

[lied_ohne_worte]

I, for one, don't like video placeholders because I have to click on a video to see what it is, instead of seeing whatever data the hosting site provides in the embedded window and a still image that will often tell me if I want to see the video at all. If someone posts a video saying simply: "Look at this!!!", I like to know if it is about something that interest me without needing to clicking a placeholder and start watching. However, that still doesn't mean I want stuff to auto-play when I read my friends page, especially when I'm in a public place.

In my opinion, any kind of non-user-initiated sound on websites is icky.

[trixieleitz]

Good point :)

Personally, I dislike embedded videos, and much prefer a link to the YouTube page, with whatever context the original poster has chosen to include. But so many of my flisties post embedded that I've largely sucked that objection up.

And auto-play is definitely a Very Bad Thing.

[norinel]

Random thought: For each video, play it for half a second automatically and take a screenshot of whatever the video is at that point; make that the placeholder image for that video. I suspect that's something like what, say, Google does for video thumbnails in search results, but LJ has slightly less computing power than Google, so there's a good chance it's infeasible.

[pinterface]

I didn't even know autoplay was allowed. If it is, I fully support its removal: autoplay doesn't make sense in a context where's it's entirely plausible you either aren't looking at the video or might have multiple videos on the page.

[pbristow]

Hear hear!

Plus it creates performance problems when, say, re-opening a tabbed browser which has several tabs stored which happen to contain embedded video. Part of the perf problem is just due to the video being embedded at all (which causes plugins to be invoked), but with autoplay there's additional networking and CPU load from trying to stream and play the videos. Result: The whole machine gums up until enough of those tasks have finished to allow the UI to start responding again, and only *then* can you succesfully hit the pause or stop buttons on all those videos you didn't want playing in the first place! =:o\

[ex_uniquewo]

+1

[lassarina]

Yes. This.

[charliemc]

I didn't realize this was possible (???). I don't think I've ever seen any videos here at LJ that autoplayed...