Slidearts

Safari Browser Video Fix

Safari Won't Auto Play

At Slide Arts, we are by default, Mac people.  We have been since the early 1990s. Not that it really matters much any more.
What this means is that we typically use Mac Safari as our default browser.  Over the past few weeks we have been working on some websites that include top sliders that have looping videos embedded in them.  We noticed that these videos were no longer automatically playing in Safari but were working just fine in Chrome.
Follow that up with a client contacting us to say their video that WAS working fine is now not doing the auto play thing. Once again we checked in Chrome and all was fine.  Definitely a Safari issue going on.
As typically is done, a quick Google search happened for “Safari video not auto playing” and we found some interesting information.
It appears that there was an update to Safari that now includes a setting where you can control whether videos auto-play or not. Check out the screen shot from our computer:
Slide Arts Website Design
Notice the new “Auto-Play” tab in Safari Preferences.
Now look at the list of currently open websites in my Safari browser (at the time of this screen shot) and the settings.  Yep – 3 of the websites I am working on that are showing issues with videos not auto-playing are listed with the setting “Stop Media with Sound”.
To be honest, we’re not sure when or how this happened – but it appears that the bottom right selection is the setting that is causing this: When visiting other websites “Stop Media with Sound”.
A simple change of this setting to “Allow All Auto-Play” fixed our issue.