Web player starts paused

[sentience 1]

When I click the play button on an episode in the library, the web player opens for the episode, but it starts paused. I need to then click the play button on the player for the episode to actually begin playing.

 

Is this the intended behaviour? Is there some way to configure the web app's player to begin playing automatically?

[Luke 42077]

Hi, what browser and version?

[sentience 1]

You're right; it seems to be browser specific.

 

I'm seeing this in Safari 13.1 on macOS 10.15.4.

 

The issue does not occur in Chrome.

[Luke 42077]

Those browsers don't allow us to auto play. That's why this happens. You have to click the play button in the video player in order to start playback.

[sentience 1]

That's a shame. I guess you're using a different player technology than, say, YouTube, which does auto-play in Safari?

[Luke 42077]

I'll take another look at it but we have a lot more requirements due to all of our features as opposed to YouTube which is just click and play. We have things that happen in between you clicking play and play actually starting and that's what causes is to run into the auto play restriction.

[sentience 1]

Curiously, I'm seeing playback begin immediately on some occasions, and require an additional click on the Play button on other occasions. I haven't yet been able to detect a pattern for this.

 

I might try some experiments with the Console open to see if there's any interesting output that could point to a race condition of some kind.

[Luke 42077]

 

 

Curiously, I'm seeing playback begin immediately on some occasions, and require an additional click on the Play button on other occasions.

Once you manually click the play button the first time, the browser will allow autoplay after that for the remainder of the session until you refresh the page in the browser.

[fogpuppy 1]

I'm seeing this problem too on my Mac with Safari but Chrome does autostart.  On my iPad and iPhone it does not autostart on either Safari or Chrome..   I do think there must be a way around this because the Plex Web interface does autoplay quit nicely on all platforms I've tried.

[fogpuppy 1]

I takes this partially back.  plex web does not always auto play. It's a bit funky too.  But when it doesn't it displays a big Play button in the middle of the screen so it's obvious what to do.  For Emby it's not obvious you need to do something ... And on some movies that start with a dark screen it looks especially bad because all you get is a black screen that looks broken ....

[Luke 42077]

Right we should show the player controls in this situation.

[fogpuppy 1]

That would make it much more obvious what people were supposed to do and probably "solve" the problem. thanks