Tutorials Videos defaulting to muted using Chrome & Safari

trinode · November 12, 2018, 1:16pm

Hi, I’m having a slight issue with the site in that whenever I load a course video it’s almost always muted by default, is there a preference somewhere?

This is happening on multiple computers, in multiple browsers.

The current symptoms are I go to a course and the first video is fine, but if I select another video from the section list, it switched to that video, but is muted.

Tekalight · November 12, 2018, 1:49pm

Hey @trinode

Checked this behavior on my end and everything just fine, I still have sound enable whenever I switch videos.

One assumption here, I can see in your video that you have FL Studio opened in the background if not mistaking, I think this could be the issue with sound output being hold by FL and not freeing the output for other apps, very common behavior with many DAWs & Audio Apps. Might be some settings to tweaks to share your audio out with your Daw & other apps.

In FL Studio you might want to take a look at the “Auto Close” option in the Audio Settings.

More about this here( check the Options/Audio Input / Output section : Audio Settings

Tekalight · November 12, 2018, 2:09pm

Next to this “perhaps” FL studio issue, could you please be more specific about this :

MacOS ? Windows ?

Web Browsers you’ve been testing and have this issue ?

Thanks

trinode · November 12, 2018, 2:30pm

The video is of FL studio, FL is not running

Chrome (70.0.3538.102) and Safari on High Sierra, Chrome on Windows 10

It’s not a problem with audio devices being exclusively locked, as I can unmute as I wish.

trinode · November 12, 2018, 2:40pm

It looks to be related to autoplaying the videos.

Parameters for the player you appear to be using, automute is defaulted to true and it’s not being set otherwise:-

Chrome stopped videos playing if they played audio - to kill off those annoying video adverts fairly recently, so to allow autoplay it’s muted… I’d rather not allow autoplay in that case… Presumably Safari followed suit.

Tekalight · November 12, 2018, 2:51pm

OK for FL got that, but it could have been…

Yea, was tested here too and it seems to be the new standard for Chrome & Safari, getting the same behaviour here with those 2 when it will just work fine as before with Mozilla Firefox.

We’re also having a look into this now, thanks for reporting.

Tekalight · November 12, 2018, 5:44pm

Hey again @trinode

So this really seems to be the new Policy in terms of Audio “Auto Play” & “Auto Mute” and it’s probably gonna be the standard soon. Not every Web Browsers are following this new “rule” yet, Mozilla Firefox doesn’t implement it yet for exemple, but it’s gonna be more & more this way since it was requested by users for a long time.

Whenever there’s some tweaks settings or code implementation from the Video hosting side of things that could be done to bypass this new behaviour, it’s not even recommended by the platforms themselves since they want to comply to the new standard too.

So long story short : it’s probably gonna get more like this in the future with many Web Browsers

Here is a tweak at the Browser End User Level for Chrome anyway :

Open a new Tab in Chrome and paste in : chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy
In the available option pick up the following : “No user gesture is required”
Relaunch Chrome and check again chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy to ensure that this option is still activated.
You should now be able to switch videos and get normal Autoplay behaviour like it was before.

Please note that this can be temporary based on how deep you will perform cache or history cleaning on your Mac as well as overwrite by any future version of Chrome and the option could even disappear in upcoming versions.

Meanwhile it should help you to follow tutorials on Chrome with less annoyance.

Hope this helps.

Cheers !

trinode · November 12, 2018, 5:51pm

If you set autoPlay=true autoMute=false at your end, in the newer browsers we’d get the video with sound paused but playable with a single click if our browser did have this feature, and if it didn’t then it would just play with sound.

Even better than that, chrome will after a while of the user clicking to start it, it will start autoplaying with sound (it sees how often you start an autopaused video and learns to trust the site.) (Media Engagement Index)

Tekalight · November 12, 2018, 6:35pm

Was more thinking about an immediate workaround that could help other Chrome users too here, that’s the main purpose of the forums, but S.A team will be looking into this, let’s keep it simple for other members here.

bryan_spence · November 13, 2018, 1:53pm

give it a test now

Tekalight · November 13, 2018, 2:20pm

Yep, now working fine with Chrome after resetting the chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy to default,

Still no luck with Safari though

trinode · November 13, 2018, 4:19pm

I’ve only looked on safari, but it seems autoMute and/or autoplay is not yet disabled?

Tekalight · November 13, 2018, 4:48pm

@trinode well, reading about this I found many articles saying that it was implemented following the IOS dev. specs and brought to the desktop version of Safari too.

It does not work in latest Version 12.0.1 (13606.2.104.1.2) on macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G3025) here.
This release is pretty recent ( 30 Oct 2018 ).

What version are you running ?

Using the “Websites” preferences to allow Auto Play does not seem to help either.