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Is there a way of disabling auto-play of video in Chrome? Many sites have moved to HTML5 video and so you have ads or featured videos that start automatically playing the moment the page loads.

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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On Android Chrome 54, turn off autoplay of media by going to Settings - Site Settings - Media - Autoplay and Block autoplay.

This feature is disabled if you have data compression enabled in your Android Chrome browser.

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    addendum: On Android Chrome 80, these settings do not exist at all. There does not appear to be any way to block media autoplay.
    – fire
    Apr 4, 2020 at 20:36
  • Chrome 99: the Media setting does not appear to exist.
    – Kvothe
    Mar 24 at 12:54
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Starting from Chrome 47, there's a Chrome flag that is used to turn media autoplay on/off:

Disable gesture requirement for media playback.

Disable user gesture requirement for playing media elements. Activating this will allow autoplay to work.

You can see it by going to this link: chrome://flags/#disable-gesture-requirement-for-media-playback;

The default status for the flag is disabled, so autoplay should not work: you should check your Chrome version and eventually update it. I tested with version 47 and autoplay does not work unless you turn on the flag.

Other info here.

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  • It's for background tabs, not the current tab.
    – CadentOrange
    Dec 16, 2015 at 16:18
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    I tested again right now and it works also in the foreground tab in Chrome 47... Have you tested it? Could you share the link you tried?
    – dipanda
    Dec 16, 2015 at 16:44
  • Try visiting this page. The ad on there autoplays and the speaker icon appears in my notification bar.
    – CadentOrange
    Dec 18, 2015 at 14:14
  • I've just tried this on a variety of pages - in particular smh.com.au - and it appears to block the playback on all videos, thankfully. That said, contrary to the OP, it was Disabled initially and I had to Enable it to disable the auto-playback. The description states "User gesture requirement for playing media elements. Disabling this will allow auto-play to work".
    – Mike
    Sep 15, 2016 at 4:56
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Chrome for Android doesn't have an option to disable autoplay. My solution is: Switch to Firefox.

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