How To Autoplay Videos And Why You Don't Want To

How To Autoplay Videos And Why You Don’t Want To

Personally I don’t recommend that the videos on your website or blog are set to auto play. (the reasons are listed belows) Depending on what your site is about having them auto play might be to your advantage however there’s no feature to set up your video to auto play. Remember before you enable auto play on your videos that doing so can actually harm your site. Many people don’t like videos or music playing as soon as they open a page, especially if there’s no way to turn it off that’s easy to spot. Look at your site to see if this is something that you want to do.

1. To make your videos auto play open either notepad or any writing or document program your computer has that allows you to write text.

2. Go to YouTube and click on the embed option like you would normally. Copy and paste the embedded code and paste it on notepad.

3. Look at the code where you need to make the change is at the very end of the URL address of the video it should look something like this;

http://www. A you tube video.com/embed/some letters and numbers=0”

In-between the zero and quotation marks you want to add the following exactly as it’s shown.

&autoplay=1

4. Once that’s added highlight the entire code once again, and copy and paste it. Go to your website or blog and add it like you would normally add a video to it. Save your progress and check to see if the video works. If it’s playing as soon as the page loads then it works.

Why auto playing videos is a bad thing for your website

If you’ve thought about having your favourite music or video auto play on your website or blog you might want to rethink that idea. That is of course unless you don’t want anyone visiting your site. Here are some reasons why you don’t want to do this.

1. It’s annoying

You have to think of it this way, they could be at work and don’t want their boss finding out their slacking off by looking at your site. Not to mention they could be already listening to their own music, and the last thing they want is music that they might not even like blasting into their earphones of speakers.

2. It can slow down your sites load time

Auto playing music not so much, this applies more to videos, but with the increasing numbers of internet browsers who use mobile means, Iphone or blackberry for example. Depending on where you live in the world using one of these devices will have bandwidth/download limits. So having a file that automatically plays will slow your site down even more, leaving them frustrated which in turn means they will leave.

3. People like choice

This ties in with the first reason. If let’s say you’re a big time metal fan and a visitor likes classical music their not going to like what your playing. People also don’t like being forced into something they don’t want to hear or see.

If you do decide that this is something that you want for your site, please remember one thing. Have the controls in an easy to find place preferably at the top of the page, so your visitors can turn it off if they don’t like it. You can also remove opt to remove the sound.