1338259 - Consider autoplay and pause based on media element visibility

Status: NEW

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Philip Jägenstedt [:foolip]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

In https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/1409 and https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/2324 the HTML spec has changed to allow for autoplay based on the visibility of the media element.


Actual results:

Chrome and Safari will be shipping this behavior.


Expected results:

Consider this for Firefox mobile, and please leave feedback on GitHub if you're not happy with this direction.

Comment 1

[Blake Wu [:bwu][:blakewu]]

Philip,
Thanks for firing this bug!

Comment 2

[Anthony Jones (:ajones, :kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e)]

I'm not sure we need to be in a hurry to do this because we already shut down decoders in background tabs and outside the viewport. We get an improvement on all videos rather than just autoplay but this could give us a further improvement.

Comment 3

[Blake Wu [:bwu][:blakewu]]

For autoplay, Alastor has implemented a mechanism to pause it until the tab is visible at first time. It is nice to pause it when it is outside of viewpoint as well. 

Alastor, 
Please put this on your plate and have fun!

Comment 4

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Agree with Anthony. 
First, we've already shut down decoder when the video is invisible. Second, I personally don't like this feature [1] because it would also stop the audio when the video is not visible, and it's annoying.
I'll leave my opinion on the github.

[1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/2324

Comment 5

[Blake Wu [:bwu][:blakewu]]

That's a good point that users may like to listen to the audio part.
So maybe we could pause video-only or muted media. More and more websites start to use video-only, like https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/horizon-zero-dawn-ps4/. Many ads are video-only or muted. If we could pause it that would save network bandwidth and help load the elements inside the viewport faster. That's what shutdown decoder cannot help.