Videos autoplaying on iOS unmuted

problem
#1

For the last few days, using the iOS apps I’ve had problems with videos popping up full-screen and autoplaying (with sound!) when I’m not even on the story that contains the video (I guess it happens while on the story before and after, as well as on the story that actually linked the video). This is reading stories in text view.

I believe videos this morning came from two feeds,  https://newsblur.com/site/5526522/ (non-Twitter, the “Barenboim on 60 Minutes” story)) and https://newsblur.com/site/6337026/ (twitter, the MLK story). I don’t know if there’s a way to link to the particular story containing an embedded video, but hopefully you can find those posts.

If I access those stories via “Read Stories”, at least the videos only launch on the stories containing them, but I don’t want the videos going full-screen (with sound!) at all, and it takes a while for the video player to start up sometimes, so I could be a few stories away and suddenly the video from the story with the embedded video pops up when it finishes launching the video player.

1 Like
#2

I’m getting this too (sometimes multiple times with the same video).

Horizontal story scrolling on iOS works by displaying a sliding ‘window’ into 3 Web browsers: previous story, current story and next story. These get updated to surround the current story to make scrolling smooth and preload content. Normally those other Web browsers should not be seen, but…

Here’s the change from 2014 that enables autoplay in these videos:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/commit/4301738913e117d03b94204dfa157c12a2f2fe88 

Maybe Sam remembers the rationale but I changed the NO to a YES and can confirm it suppresses autoplay on the Barenboim story (or rather a Pfizer ad is what I ended up getting :slight_smile: as above.  I had no trouble tapping on YouTube videos to play them either.

So hopefully this is an easy fix!

#3

Ah-ha, thank you for the fix Nicholas! I’ve just fixed it and will push in an upcoming update.