Can't autoplay youtube video in android chrome

2
votes

I am using IFrame Player API to play youtube videos in my website.when user clicks a particular link it popups a lightbox and plays video automatically.In Desktop it works fine,and in ios I understand why doesn't it work (they already mentioned why), but for android chrome its not working.Is autoplay was disabled also in andorid browsers? Please enlighten me.

1
javascriptandroidyoutube-iframe-api

1 Answers

3
votes

This link seems to answer most of your questions:

YouTube iframe embeds cannot autoplay on Android

But in short, it seems like autoplay has been disabled on Chrome for Android so you need to treat it in the same way as iOS and use a user interaction to trigger the play.

Update: There's a more affirmative information that it has been disabled here: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/07/autoplay#why_the_change

It will play however if you set it to autoplay in a muted state.

A solution I've just been working on for autoplaying would be to instantiate the player with an empty video on page load:

var player = new YT.Player('yt-media-player', {
  height: height,
  width: width,
  videoId: ''
});

Then on the click event of opening the lightbox you can load the particular video and call it to play:

player.loadVideoById(youtubeId);

player.playVideo();