806269 - on some pages, html5 video's audio loads automatically without user intervention and without the video playing

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[donrhummy]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20121023123711

Steps to reproduce:

navigated to this page: http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/extras/extra_bases/


Actual results:

ALL of the different embedded videos' audio stated playing automatically at the same time as the page was loading. I did not click on anything and agree scrolling down, none of the videos were playing despite all their audio tracks playing


Expected results:

nothing should have started playing until I explicitly clicked on it

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

This is also reproducible in any desktop browser using the Fennec UA and disabling plugins.

Brightcove, the media content provider for Boston.com has enabled `autoStart` on that particular video (passed as a parameter). 

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/htmlFederated?&width=609&height=393&flashID=myExperience1887&bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&playerID=86250326001&playerKey=AQ~~%2CAAAAAA6piHY~%2CDqRT40XOAr-TnXMtiTj9PVhpaUVs3LGp&isVid=true&isUI=true&wmode=transparent&%40videoPlayer=1920050954001&adServerURL=http%3A%2F%2Frmedia.boston.com%2FRealMedia%2Fads%2Fadstream_sx.ads%2Fwww.boston.com%2Fsports%2Fredsox%2Fextrabases%2Fhomepage%2F%40VIDEO%3F&escapeAdRequest=false&dynamicStreaming=true&includeAPI=true&templateLoadHandler=myTemplateLoaded&autoStart=&debuggerID=&startTime=1351483605239&refURL=not%20available

Comment 3

[Markus Popp]

Why is this bug marked RESOLVED INVALID?

Comment 4

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

As mentioned in comment #1, the video player the site is using has defined autoStart (autoPlay) on it.

Comment 5

[Markus Popp]

Still, a Flash component should NEVER play if I have plugins disabled in the settings (as noted in bug 806455).

Comment 6

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

(In reply to Markus Popp from comment #5)
> Still, a Flash component should NEVER play if I have plugins disabled in the
> settings (as noted in bug 806455).

The content that auto-playing is not Flash, it is HTML5 Audio.

Comment 7

[Markus Popp]

Now I (believe to) understand.

So this starts to occur in Firefox 17 as this is the 1st version to support MP3 playback (as HTML5 audio). And while Flash seems to be used for the video, it uses HTML5 for audio playback.

Thanks for clarifying.

Comment 8

[donrhummy]

(In reply to Aaron Train [:aaronmt] from comment #6)
> (In reply to Markus Popp from comment #5)
> > Still, a Flash component should NEVER play if I have plugins disabled in the
> > settings (as noted in bug 806455).
> 
> The content that auto-playing is not Flash, it is HTML5 Audio.

Quick question (so I know whether to post another bug report or not): given that Firefox now forces user interaction for playing/activating plugins, are there any plans to do the same for HTML5 video/audio?

Comment 9

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

None yet, but its an interesting question. There is a media.autoplay.enabled about:config pref that should disable this feature for now if you want.

Comment 10

[Markus Popp]

I just set media.autoplay.enabled to false and it stopped automatic audio playback on kurier.at.

While this is certainly a workaround, some more flexible options would be nice. Like integrating it to the permission system where users can allow certain sites to auto playback while disallowing others, similar to how it's currently done with plugins or fullscreen.

Comment 11

[donrhummy]

(In reply to Wesley Johnston (:wesj) from comment #9)
> None yet, but its an interesting question. There is a media.autoplay.enabled
> about:config pref that should disable this feature for now if you want.

Maybe we could change this bug to instead be:

Firefox does not offer the same preference/ability to delay activation of HTML5 audio/video like with plugins.

I think this is a valuable and important feature. There's a reason why plugins require user intervention and I think any video/audio falls into the same category. Perhaps there could be a popup notification (like the one for "This site is asking for your location") which could list the html5 audio/video elements that want to play automatically and ask if you're ok with that?